John Milton

John Milton was born in 1608 at a house in Bread Street, London, almost under the shadow of St. Paul's Cathedral. Shakespeare was living in London then and writing his plays - indeed there is a story that Milton. A boy of six or seven once met Shakespeare, then a man of almost fifty. Milton's father was a kind of lawyer, a Puritan but a man of learning and a lover of music. John Milton went to school at St. Paul's famous English school, and then when he was seventeen to Christ's College, Cambridge. From his early youth Milton seems to have known, with complete certainty, that God had chosen him for some great purpose to which his whole life had to be devoted. At first he thought of entering the Church as a preacher, but later he decided this was not his chosen work, and after taking his degree he returned to the little village of Horton in Buckinghamshire, 17 miles from London, where his father had retired, and he settled down to six more years of study, to reading poetry, philosophy, music and languages. There was always in Milton’s mind the idea of a great poem that he was to write. What its subject was to be he did not know, but in his determination to choose the noblest of subjects and to write in a style worthy of the subject, he read and studied in order to become familiar with the best that had been written and done by other men. Milton mastered Greek and Latin literature completely, learned French, Italian and Spanish and studied the latest theories of science. This way followed by travels in France and Italy where he perfected his knowledge of French and Italian. John Milton visited theatres there, listened to music and met great and learned men, including Galileo, now old and blind and in prison. Milton had intended to go to Greece, but the news of the coming struggle in England brought him home. John Milton considered it a dishonorable thing. To be travelling for amusements abroad in foreign lands while his countrymen were fighting for liberty at home. So in 1639 Milton came back, and joined the struggle in the way he thought he could help best, not by fighting but by writing to explain and to defend the Puritan cause. For the next twenty years he wrote practically no poetry. Milton said that it is fine and to sing the ways of God. It is finer and nobler to fulfill them. Milton’s prose writings, powerful, fierce, learned, have, generally speaking, lost their interest for us now. But one great work stands out, one of the greatest pieces of prose in our language, his Areopagitica defending the freedom of the press. In 1649 Milton became Foreign Secretary to Cromwell. John Milton worked day and night writing in Latin, countless letters to foreign rulers, reading and translating their replies. As you have seen, the cause of Puritanism gained the day. Charles I was defeated and executed and Cromwell became ruler of England. But the price that Milton paid was terrible one. At the age of forty-three, with a great work still unwritten, Milton became completely and incurably blind. The doctors had warned him some years before that if he continued with his work he ran the certain risk of going blind. He decided to go on with his work. Still further disasters came upon him. Cromwell died, and in 1660 Charles II, son of the executed Charles I, was brought back from France to be King of England. Everything that the Puritans leaders were hunted down, imprisoned, put to death. Milton, perhaps because of his blindness, escaped death, but he left in London and retired to a little cottage in Chalfont St. Giles, about twenty miles from London. And here, lonely and blind and in disgrace, he wrote; or rather dictated to his daughters, his greatest work - the greatest long poem in the language- Paradise lost. Its vast imaginative flight takes in the boundless space of Heaven, Earth and Hell. Its subject is the fall of Lucifer (Satan) and the fall of man. It tells with tremendous power of Satan's revolt, and of the war in Heaven that followed. Satan is defeated and cast down Hell. Here in darkness and pain he forms, with the other fallen angels, a mighty empire and plans revenge. In the form of a serpent he comes to Paradise to bring evil into the world. Adam and Eva are tempted and fall and Paradise is lost. But the greatness of the poem lies not in the story but in the supreme power and nobility of the language, in the mighty music of the verse, and in the noble spirit that inspires the whole work. In 1671 two more great works followed Paradise Lost. They were the long poem Paradise Regained and the drama Samson Agonists. In the figure of Samson we feel that Milton sees himself. Samson is blind. He, like Milton, has seen his cause defeated and his enemies triumphant. But, like Milton, he is a rebel, proud and courageous, and in the face of blindness, disgrace and slavery he can still serve God's purpose. In doing this he brings about his own death. But his death is his triumph. In 1674 John Milton died. He is buried in London in the churchyard of St. Giles, Cripplegate, not far from the street where he was born.