John Milton

Thank you my friend SGT (Join to see) for making us aware that on November 8, 1674, John Milton, English poet and Puritan (Paradise Lost), died at the age of 65.

Introduction: Milton, Power, and the Power of Milton
An introduction to John Milton: man, poet, and legend. Milton's place at the center of the English literary canon is asserted, articulated, and examined through a discussion of Milton's long, complicated association with literary power. The conception of Miltonic power and its calculated use in political literature is analyzed in the feminist writings of Lady Mary Chudleigh, Mary Astell, and Virginia Woolf. Later the god-like qualities often ascribed to Miltonic authority are considered alongside Satan's excursus on the constructed nature of divine might in Paradise Lost, and the notorious character's method of analysis is shown to be a useful mode of encountering the author himself.

00:00 - Chapter 1. Introduction: Milton's Power as a Poet
15:37 - Chapter 2. Lady Mary Chudleigh on Milton and the Priority of the Sexes
19:42 - Chapter 3. Mary Astell on Milton and the Priority of the Sexes
24:03 - Chapter 4. Virginia Woolf on Milton and the Priority of the Sexes
32:20 - Chapter 5. Milton, Power and the Revolution against God by Satan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf91LApkCpU

Images:
1. John Milton by an unknown artist © National Portrait Gallery
2. Portrait of John Milton 1608 – 1674, poet, polemicist, & Civil Servant by John Hoskins
3. John Milton's Paradise Lost
4. John Milton at age 10 by Cornelis Janssens van Ceulen.

Biographies;
1. poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-milton]
2. artwarefineart.com/gallery/portrait-john-milton-1608-%E2%80%93-1674-poet-polemicist-man-letters-civil-servant]

1. Background from {[ https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-milton]}
John Milton’s career as a writer of prose and poetry spans three distinct eras: Stuart England; the Civil War (1642-1648) and Interregnum, including the Commonwealth (1649-1653) and Protectorate (1654-1660); and the Restoration. Milton’s chief polemical prose was written in the decades of the 1640s and 1650s, during the strife between the Church of England and various reformist groups such as the Puritans and between the monarch and Parliament. Designated the antiepiscopal or antiprelatical tracts and the antimonarchical or political tracts, these works advocate a freedom of conscience and a high degree of civil liberty for humankind against the various forms of tyranny and oppression, both ecclesiastical and governmental. In line with his libertarian outlook, Milton wrote Areopagitica (1644), often cited as one of the most compelling arguments on the freedom of the press. In March 1649 Milton was appointed secretary for foreign tongues to the Council of State. His service to the government, chiefly in the field of foreign policy, is documented by official correspondence, the Letters of State, first published in 1694. Milton vigorously defended Cromwell’s government in Eikonoklastes (1649), or Imagebreaker, which was a personal attack on Charles I likening him to William Shakespeare‘s duke of Gloucester (afterward Richard III), a consummate hypocrite. Up to the Restoration, Milton continued to write in defense of the Protectorate despite going blind by 1652. After Charles II was crowned, Milton was dismissed from governmental service, apprehended, and imprisoned. Payment of fines and the intercession of friends and family, including Andrew Marvell, Sir William Davenant, and perhaps Christopher Milton, his younger brother and a Royalist lawyer, brought about Milton’s release. In the troubled period at and after the Restoration he was forced to depart his home which he had occupied for eight years in Petty-France, Westminster. He took up residence elsewhere, including the house of a friend in Bartholomew Close; eventually, he settled in a home at Artillery Walk toward Bunhill Fields. On or about 8 November 1674, when he was almost sixty-six years old, Milton died of complications from gout.

While Milton’s impact as a prose writer was profound, of equal or greater importance is his poetry. He referred to his prose works as the achievements of his “left hand.” Like the illustrious literary forebears with whom he invites comparison, Milton used his poetry to address issues of religion and politics, the central concerns also of his prose. Placing himself in a line of poets whose art was an outlet for their public voice and using, like them, the pastoral poem to present an outlook on politics, Milton aimed to promote an enlightened commonwealth, not unlike the polis of Greek antiquity or the cultured city-states in Renaissance Italy. In 1645 he published his first volume of poetry, Poems of Mr. John Milton , Both English and Latin, much of which was written before he was twenty years old. The volume manifests a rising poet, one who has planned his emergence and projected his development in numerous ways: mastery of ancient and modern languages—Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Italian; awareness of various traditions in literature; and avowed inclination toward the vocation of poet. The poems in the 1645 edition run the gamut of various genres: psalm paraphrase, sonnet, canzone, masque, pastoral elegy, verse letter, English ode, epigram, obituary poem, companion poem, and occasional verse. Ranging from religious to political in subject matter, serious to mock-serious in tone, and traditional to innovative in the use of verse forms, the poems in this volume disclose a self-conscious author whose maturation is undertaken with certain models in mind, notably Virgil from classical antiquity and Edmund Spenser in the English Renaissance. When one considers that the 1645 volume was published when Milton was approximately thirty-seven years old, though some of the poems were written as early as his fifteenth year, it is evident that he sought to draw attention to his unfolding poetic career despite its interruption by governmental service. Perhaps he also sought to highlight the relationship of his poetry to his prose and to call attention to his aspiration, evident in several works in the 1645 volume, to become an epic poet. Thus, the poems in the volume were composed in Stuart England but published after the onset of the English Civil War. Furthermore, Milton may have begun to compose one or more of his mature works—Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes—in the 1640s, but they were completed and revised much later and not published until after the Restoration.

This literary genius whose fame and influence are second to none, and on whose life and works more commentary is written than on any author except Shakespeare, was born at 6:30 in the morning on 9 December 1608. His parents were John Milton , Sr., and Sara Jeffrey Milton , and the place of birth was the family home, marked with the sign of the spread eagle, on Bread Street, London. Three days later, at the parish church of All Hallows, also on Bread Street, he was baptized into the Protestant faith of the Church of England. Other children of John and Sara who survived infancy included Anne, their oldest child, and Christopher, seven years younger than John. At least three others died shortly after birth, in infancy or in early childhood. Edward Phillips, Anne’s son by her first husband, was tutored by Milton and later wrote a biography of his renowned uncle, which was published in Milton’s Letters of State (1694). Christopher, in contrast to his older brother on all counts, became a Roman Catholic, a Royalist, and a lawyer.

Milton’s father was born in 1562 in Oxfordshire; his father, Richard, was a Catholic who decried the Reformation. When John Milton, Sr., expressed sympathy for what his father viewed as Protestant heresy, their disagreements resulted in the son’s disinheritance. He left home and traveled to London, where he became a scrivener and a professional composer responsible for more than twenty musical pieces. As a scrivener he performed services comparable to a present-day attorney’s assistant, law stationer, and notary. Among the documents that a scrivener executed were wills, leases, deeds, and marriage agreements. Through such endeavors and by his practice of money lending, the elder Milton accumulated a handsome estate, which enabled him to provide a splendid formal education for his son John and to maintain him during several years of private study. In “Ad Patrem” (To His Father), a Latin poem composed probably in 1637-1638, Milton celebrated his “revered father.” He compares his father’s talent at musical composition, harmonizing sounds to numbers and modulating the voices of singers, to his own dedication to the muses and to his developing artistry as a poet. The father’s “generosities” and “kindnesses” enabled the young man to study Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, and Italian.”

Little is known of Sara Jeffrey, but in Pro Propulo Anglicano Defensio Secunda (The Second Defense of the People of England, 1654) Milton refers to the “esteem” in which his mother was held and to her reputation for almsgiving in their neighborhood. John Aubrey, in biographical notes made in 1681-1682, recorded that she had weak eyesight, which may have contributed to her son’s similar problems. She died on 3 April 1637, not long before her son John departed for his European journey. Her husband died on 14 March 1647.”

In the years 1618-1620 Milton was tutored in the family home. One of his tutors was Thomas Young, who became chaplain to the English merchants in Hamburg during the 1620s. Though he departed England when Milton was approximately eleven years old, Young’s impression on the young pupil was long standing. Two of Milton’s familiar letters, as well as “Elegia quarta” (Elegy IV), are addressed to Young. (The term elegy in the titles of seven of Milton’s Latin poems designates the classical prosody in which they were written, couplets consisting of a verse of dactylic hexameter followed by a verse of pentameter; elegy, when used to describe poems of sorrow or lamentation, refers to Milton’s meditations on the deaths of particular persons.) Also dedicated to Young is Of Reformation (1641), a prose tract; and the “TY” of the acronym SMECTYMNUUS in the title of Milton’s antiprelatical tract of 1641 identifies Young as one of the five ministers whose stand against church government by bishops was admired by Milton.”

From 1620 until 1625 Milton attended St. Paul’s School, within close walking distance of his home and within view of the cathedral, where almost certainly he heard the sermons of Dr. John Donne, who served as dean from 1621 until 1631. The school had been founded in the preceding century by John Colet, and the chief master when Milton attended was Alexander Gill the Elder. His son, also named Alexander and an instructor at the school, did not teach Milton . Some of Milton’s familiar letters are addressed to the elder and the younger Gills, with whom he maintained contact, chiefly to express gratitude for their commitment to learning and to communicate to them his unfolding plans and aspirations. During his years at St. Paul’s, Milton befriended Charles Diodati, who became his closest companion in boyhood and to whom he wrote “Elegia prima” (Elegy I) and “Elegia sexta” (Elegy VI). They maintained their friendship even though Diodati attended Oxford while Milton was at Cambridge.”

On 9 April 1625 Milton , then sixteen years of age, matriculated at Christ’s College, Cambridge, evidently in preparation for the ministry. For seven years he studied assiduously to receive the bachelor of arts degree (1629) and the master of arts degree (1632). With his first tutor at Cambridge, the logician William Chappell, Milton had some sort of disagreement, after which he may have been whipped. Thereafter, in the Lent term of 1626, Milton was rusticated or suspended, a circumstance to which he refers in “Elegia prima.” After his return to Cambridge later that year and for the remainder of his years there he was tutored by Nathaniel Tovey. At Cambridge Milton was known as “The Lady of Christ’s,” to which he refers in his sixth prolusion, an oratorical performance and academic exercise that he presented in 1628. While the reasons for the sobriquet are uncertain, one suspects that Milton’s appearance seemed feminine to some onlookers. In fact, this theory is supported by a portrait of Milton commissioned by his father when the future poet was ten years old. The delicate features, pink-and-white complexion, and auburn hair, not to mention the black doublet with gold braid and the collar with lace frills, project a somewhat feminine image. Another portrait, painted while he was a student at Cambridge, shows a handsome youth, appearing somewhat younger than his twenty-one years. His long hair falls to the white ruff collar that he wears over a black doublet. His dark brown hair has a reddish cast to it, and his complexion is fair. Apart from his appearance, Milton may have been called “The Lady of Christ’s” because his commitment to study caused him to withdraw from the more typical male activities of athletics and socializing.”

By 1632 Milton had completed a sizable body of poetry. At St. Paul’s he had translated and paraphrased Psalms 114 and 136 from Greek into English. Throughout his Cambridge years he composed many of the poems in the 1645 volume: the seven Latin elegies (three verse letters, two funeral tributes, a celebration of spring, and an acknowledgment of the power of Cupid), other Latin verse, seven prolusions, six or seven sonnets (some in Italian), and numerous poems in English. The works in English include “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” “The Passion,” “On Shakespeare,” the Hobson poems, “L’Allegro,” and “Il Penseroso.”

The circumstances of composition of Milton’s Nativity poem, classified as an ode, are recounted in “Elegia sexta,” a verse letter written to Diodati in early 1630. To his close friend Milton confided that the poem was composed at dawn on Christmas day in December 1629. In “Elegia sexta” Milton summarizes the poem, which, he says, sings of the “heaven-descended King, the bringer of peace, and the blessed times promised in the sacred books.” Likewise, the Christ child “and his stabling under a mean roof” are contrasted with the “gods that were suddenly destroyed in their own shrines” (translation by Merritt Y. Hughes). “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” is divided into two sections, the induction and the hymn. The induction is composed of four stanzas in rime royal, a seven-line stanza of iambic pentameter; the hymn consists of twenty-seven stanzas, each eight lines long, combining features of rime royal and the Spenserian stanza. The poem develops thematic opposition between the pagan gods—associated with darkness, dissonance, and bestiality—and Christ—associated with light, harmony, and the union of divine and human natures.”

In addition to the contrasting themes, the poem addresses two of the major paradoxes or mysteries of Christianity: the Virgin Birth and the two natures of Christ. By using oxymoron or succinct paradox—”wedded Maid, and Virgin Mother”—to describe Mary, the poet suggests the mystery of the Virgin Birth, whereby Mary retains her purity and chastity despite impregnation by the godhead. To describe the combination of two natures in Christ, the poet resorts to biblical allusion, particularly Paul’s letter to the Philippians (2:6-11), which recounts how the Son emptied himself of his godhead in order to take on humanity. Paul states that the Son having assumed the form of a servant or slave was obedient unto death on the cross. In the Nativity poem Milton indicates that the Son, while customarily enthroned “in Trinal Unity,” has “laid aside” his majesty to undergo suffering. By such biblical allusion Milton interrelates the Incarnation and Redemption. Paradoxically, Milton affirms that the heroism of the Son is attributable to his voluntary humiliation, so that, in effect, his triumph over the pagan gods is anticlimactic. Significantly, in a poem about the birth of the Savior, Milton foreshadows the death of Jesus, the consummate gesture of voluntary humiliation. The manger is described as a place of self-sacrifice, where the light from the star overhead and the metaphoric reference to the fires of immolation converge: “secret altar touched with hallowed fire.”

Not to be overlooked is Milton’s use of mythological allusions to dramatize the effect of Christ’s coming. Thus, the Christ child is characterized as triumphant over his pagan adversaries, one of whom, Typhon, is “huge ending in snaky twine.” Typhon, the hundred-headed serpent and a leader of the Titans, rebelled against Zeus, who cast a thunderbolt against him. After his downfall he was incarcerated under Mount Aetna and tormented by the active volcano. Such myths were typically related to the Hebraic-Christian tradition in numerous ways: in illustrated Renaissance dictionaries and encyclopedias, editions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and other lexicons known to Milton . Indeed, early biographers report that Milton himself was planning a similar compilation and interpretation of myths, though this work was never completed. Traditionally, Typhon, his revolt against Zeus, and his subsequent punishment are analogues of Satan’s rivalry of the godhead, of his downfall thereafter, and of his everlasting torment in the fires of Hell. Thus, the triumph in the Nativity poem looks backward to the War in Heaven while anticipating the final conquest over Satan foretold in the Apocalypse. The appearance of Typhon as a multiheaded serpent is further correlated by Renaissance commentators with the biblical figure of Leviathan, the dragonlike monster associated with Satan in interpretations of the Hebraic and Christian scriptures. At the same time, the Christ child is likened to the infant Hercules, who overcame the serpent that attacked him in his cradle. The foregoing examples typify how Milton’s erudition and literary imagination enabled him to pursue and synthesize a wide range of mythological and biblical allusions.”

Illustrated Renaissance lexicons, along with manuals of painting, which guided artists and authors in the use and significance of visual details, may be employed to interpret other allegorical figures in the Nativity poem. Thus, at the birth of the Savior, the poem recounts how “meek-eyed Peace” descends, “crowned with Olive green,” moved by “Turtle wing,” and “waving wide her myrtle wand.” Such visual details suggest the peace and harmony between the godhead and humankind when the dove returned with the olive branch after the Deluge and when the Holy Spirit, figured as a dove, descended at the baptism of the Lord.”

A dominant feature of the Nativity poem is the frequent reference to pagan gods, many of whom are included in the epic catalogue in book 1 of Paradise Lost (1667). One such figure is Osiris, whose shrine in the Nativity poem is described: “with Timbrel’d Anthems dark / the sable-stoled Sorcerers bear his worshipt Ark.” This description suggests a funeral procession, thereby dramatizing the causal relationship between the birth of Christ and the death of the pagan gods. Additionally, the phrase “worshipt Ark” calls attention to the ark of the Covenant, associated with the tablets of law from the Old Dispensation. Christ, however, rewrites the law in the hearts of humankind, a process to which Milton’s poem alludes. The Chosen People of the Old Dispensation thus anticipate the faithful Christian community centered on Jesus. The poem presents the first such community when the holy family, shepherds, angels, and narrator unite in their adoration of the Christ child. The narrator endeavors to join his voice to the chorus of angels so that his sacred song and devotional lyrics are harmonized with theirs. He also informs us of the imminent arrival of the Magi, who will enlarge the community of worshipers and chorus of praise. Characteristically, the poem highlights unity and harmony between humankind and the godhead, earth and Heaven, the Old and New Dispensations.”

What also emerges from the Nativity poem is an overriding awareness of Christian history, which is both linear and cyclical. As time unfolded, Old Testament events were fulfilled in Christ’s temporal ministry. Thereafter, the faithful community looks toward the Second Coming. Along this linear disposition of time there are recurrent foreshadowings and cyclical enactments of triumphs over God’s adversaries. Like the Apocalypse, the Nativity poem foresees that the ultimate defeat of Satan, having been prefigured in numerous ways, will be one of the climactic events of Christian or providential history.”

Despite its early date of composition, the Nativity poem foreshadows many features of Milton’s major works: the allusions to mythology and their assimilation to the Hebraic-Christian tradition, the conflict between the godhead and numerous adversaries, the emphasis on voluntary humiliation as a form of Christian heroism, the paramount importance of the redemptive ministry of the Son, and the Christian view of history.”

Probably intended as a companion piece to the Nativity poem, “The Passion” was written at Easter in 1630. Only eight stanzas in rime royal were composed, presumably as the induction. Appended to the unfinished work is a note indicating that the author found the subject “to be above the years he had, when he wrote it, and nothing satisfied with what was begun, left it unfinished.” The eight stanzas clarify Milton’s unfulfilled intent: to dramatize more fully the humiliation of the Son, “sovereign Priest” who “Poor fleshly Tabernacle entered.”

“On Shakespeare,” Milton’s first published poem, was composed in 1630 and printed in the Second Folio (1632) of Shakespeare’s plays, where it was included with other eulogies and commendatory verses. Milton’s poem, a sixteen-line epigram in heroic couplets, was included perhaps because of the intercession of his friend and eventual collaborator Henry Lawes, a musician and composer, who wrote the music for Milton’s Comus (1637) and probably for the songs of “Arcades” in Milton’s 1645 Poems. Milton celebrates his friend’s musical talent in Sonnet XIII. Milton’s poem echoes a prevalent opinion evident in other commendatory verses—that Shakespeare, the untutored genius with only a grammar-school education, was a natural poet whose “easy numbers flow” in contrast to “slow-endeavoring art.” Perhaps the implied contrast is between the spontaneity of Shakespeare and the more deliberate and learned composition of Ben Jonson. The foregoing contrast is explicit in “L’Allegro,” where Shakespeare’s plays, the products of “fancy’s child” who composes his “native Wood-notes wild,” are contrasted with Jonson’s “learned Sock.” The reference to Jonson calls attention to the sock or low shoe worn by actors during comedy, as well as to the learned imitation of classical dramaturgy practiced by Jonson, who had a university education. Ironically, Jonson’s commendatory poem on Shakespeare, included in the First Folio (1623) and republished in the folios thereafter, is the most renowned of the lot. It cites the excellence and popularity of Shakespeare as a dramatist despite his “small Latin, and less Greek,” an allusion, no doubt, to his lack of education beyond grammar school. More to the point, Jonson used the metonymy of the sock to appraise Shakespearean comedy as nonpareil: “when thy socks were on / Leave thee alone.” Therefore, Milton may have appropriated but adapted the allusion in order to contrast the learned and spontaneous playwrights, respectively Jonson and Shakespeare.”

Central to the poem is Milton’s recognition that an erected monument, possibly even the Stratford burial site with its bust of Shakespeare, is unsuitable to memorialize the playwright’s unique genius. Ultimately, Milton argues that Shakespeare alone can and does create a “livelong Monument”: his readers transfixed by wonder and awe. So long as his works are read, his readers will be immobilized when confronting his transcendent genius. To be sure, the inadequacy of stone or marble monuments to perpetuate one’s memory is one major theme in Shakespeare’s sonnets; a complementary theme is the permanence of literary art despite the mutability and upheaval in the human condition. Milton integrates both themes from Shakespeare’s sonnets into his poem, perhaps to emphasize that the unique achievement of Shakespeare must be memorialized by the words and ideas of none other than the master poet and dramatist himself. Despite his admiration for Shakespeare, Milton in his prose and poetry explicitly referred to the playwright only three times: in Shakespeare “L’Allegro,” and Eikonoklastes. Despite the paucity of explicit reference, commentators have, nonetheless, sought to identify verbal parallels between the works of Shakespeare and Milton . Though such parallels or apparent echoes abound, they are inadequate to establish source or influence. Virtually identical similarities may be adduced between the works of Milton and the writings of other Elizabethans. It seems unlikely that Milton , having prepared himself to be an author of religious and biblical poetry, relied heavily on Shakespeare, whose dramatic works are vastly different in conception and subject matter.”

Two of the most amusing poems of the Cambridge years were written about Thomas Hobson, the coachman who drove the circuit between London and Cambridge from 1564 until shortly before his death on 1 January 1631. Several of Milton’s fellow students also wrote witty verses. In Milton’s first poem, “On the University Carrier,” Death is personified; his attempts to claim Hobson have been thwarted in various ways. Hobson, for instance, is described as a “shifter,” one who has dodged Death. In effect, his perpetual motion made him an evasive adversary until he was forced to discontinue his trips because of the plague; then Death “got him down.” The allusion is to a wrestling match, Hobson having been overthrown. Death is personified, in turn, as a chamberlain, who perceives Hobson as having completed a day’s journey. He escorts the coachman to a sleeping room, then takes away the light. The second poem, “Another on the Same,” is more witty as it elaborates a series of paradoxes. Thus, “an engine moved with wheel and weight” refers at once to Hobson’s coach—the means of his livelihood—and to a timepiece. The circuit of the coachman is likened to movement around the face of a timepiece, motion being equated with time. The assertion that “too much breathing put him out of breath” refers to the interruption of his travel caused by the plague. While idle, in other words, he himself took ill and died. Furthermore, the poem likens his former travel to the waxing and waning of the moon, a reciprocal course of coming and going. These playful poems that treat the topic of death may be contrasted with Milton’s lamentations, such as his funeral tributes, “Elegia secunda” (Elegy II) and “Elegia tertia” (Elegy III), and the later renowned pastoral elegies: “Lycidas,” which memorializes Edward King, and “Epitaphium Damonis” (Damon’s Epitaph), which mourns the loss of Charles Diodati.”

Probably in 1631, toward the end of his stay at Cambridge, Milton composed “L’Allegro“ and “Il Penseroso,” companion poems. They may have been intended as poetic versions or parodies of the prolusions, the academic exercises at Cambridge that sometimes involved oppositional thinking. Clearcut examples include Milton’s Prolusion I (“Whether Day or Night Is the More Excellent”) and Prolusion VII (“Learning Makes Men Happier than Does Ignorance”). The correspondences and contrasts between “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso”—in themes, images, structures, and even sounds—are innumerable. Essentially, Milton compares and contrasts two impulses in human nature: the active and contemplative, the social and solitary, the mirthful and melancholic, the cheerful and meditative, the erotic and Platonic. Some commentators have identified Milton with the personality type of “Il Penseroso” and Diodati with that of “L’Allegro.” Though the poems anatomize each personality type and corresponding life-style apart from the other, the overall effect may be to foster the outlook that a binary unit, which achieves a wholesome interaction of opposites, is to be preferred. While it is difficult to assess the autobiographical significance of the companion poems or to develop a serious outlook when Milton himself may have composed them playfully, “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” graphically demonstrate the dialectic that distinguishes much of Milton’s poetry, particularly the dialogues and debates between different characters in various works, including the Lady and Comus in Comus, the younger and elder brothers in the same work, Satan and Abdiel in Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve, Samson and his visitors, and the Christ and the tempter in the wilderness of Paradise Regained (1671).”

Having spent seven years at Cambridge, Milton entered into studious leisure at his parents’ home in Hammersmith (1632-1635) and then at Horton (1635-1638). Perhaps he was caring for his parents in their old age because his sister and brother were unable to do so. Anne had become a widow in 1631 and had two young children. Probably in 1632 she married Thomas Agar, a widower who had one young child. Milton’s younger brother, Christopher, was a student at Christ’s College. The situation with his parents may explain why Milton , after Cambridge, did not accept or seek a preferment in the church. Although he may still have intended to become a minister, it seems likely that the prevailing influence of William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, who established and enforced ecclesiastical and religious regulations, deeply affected Milton’s outlook. The most concise but cryptic explanation for his eventual rejection of the ministry as a career is provided by Milton himself, who in one of his prose treatises, The Reason of Church-governement (1642), comments that he was “church-outed.” An undated letter to an unidentified friend, a document surviving in manuscript in the Trinity College Library at Cambridge, sheds further light on Milton’s view of the ministry as a career. Some commentators speculate that Thomas Young is the addressee. Another influential factor in Milton’s decision may have been his long-standing inclination to become a poet, evident in poems written in his Cambridge years and published in the 1645 edition. One of the most self-conscious, though ambiguous, statements concerning Milton’s sense of vocation is Sonnet VII (“How soon hath time”). Unfortunately, it cannot be accurately dated, though 1631-1632 seems likely. In the poem he refers to the rapid passing of time toward his “three and twentieth year.” His “hastening days fly on with full career,” though the direction of movement, toward the ministry or poetry, goes unidentified. In any case, he contends that his process of development toward “inward ripeness” continues under the all-seeing eye of Providence.”

Milton’s course of study in his leisure is outlined in Prolusion VII, which was influenced by Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning (1605). History, poetry, and philosophy (which included natural science) are celebrated as important to individual growth and to civic service. Milton’s Of Education (1644), an eight-page pamphlet written in the early 1640s, elaborates on many of the ideas in Prolusion VII and cites specific authors to be read. Autobiographical statements in various forms emerge from Milton’s period of private study, which enabled him to supplement extensively his education at Cambridge and to read numerous authors of different eras and various cultures. In a 23 November 1637 letter to Charles Diodati, Milton indicated the progress of his study, particularly in the field of classical and medieval history, involving the Greeks, Italians, Franks, and Germans. At this time, moreover, Milton kept two important records of his reading and writing. The “Trinity Manuscript” or “Cambridge Manuscript,” so called because it is kept in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, includes works such as “Arcades,” Comus, the English odes, “Lycidas,” “At a Solemn Music,” and other later, but short, poems. Also in the manuscript are sketchy plans and brief outlines of dramas, some of which were eventually transformed and assimilated to Paradise Lost. For some of the poems, the “Trinity Manuscript” includes various drafts and states of revision. The second record kept during this period is the commonplace book (now in the British Library), which lists topics under the threefold Aristotelian framework of ethics, economics, and political life, topics that aroused Milton’s interest and that were later incorporated into his prose works. The entries include direct quotations or summaries, with sources cited, so that one learns not simply what books Milton read but also what editions he used.”

Two important works that Milton wrote during the years of studious leisure include A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle and “Lycidas.” The masque was first performed on 29 September 1634, as a formal entertainment to celebrate the installation of John Egerton, Earl of Bridgewater, as lord president of Wales. The performance was held in the Great Hall of Ludlow Castle in Shropshire, close to the border of Wales. The composer of the music was Lawes, also the music tutor of the Egerton children. The three children—Alice (fifteen), John (eleven), and Thomas (nine)—enacted the parts of the Lady, the elder brother, and the younger brother. Lawes himself was the Attendant Spirit, named Thyrsis. Other characters include Comus, a tempter, by whose name the masque has been more commonly known, at least since the eighteenth century, and Sabrina, a nymph of the Severn River. Because the earl of Bridgewater had taken up his viceregal position without his family having accompanied him, a reunion was planned. To honor the earl of Bridgewater and to use the occasion of family reunion so that his children could act, sing, and dance under his approving eye are other purposes of the masque.”

While Comus may be examined in relation to masques of the same era, most notably the collaborations of Jonson and Inigo Jones, the remoteness of Ludlow prevented Milton and Lawes from mounting the sort of spectacle with elaborate scenery, complicated machinery, and astounding special effects that Jones and Jonson produced. Nor were trained dancers and singers transported from London. Nevertheless, Comus does have scenery, chiefly for its allegorical significance; singing, especially by individuals, such as the Lady, Sabrina, and Thyrsis; and dancing, both the riotous antimasque of Comus and his revelers and the concluding song and dance of triumph featuring the three children and others referred to as “Country-Dancers,” all under the direction of Lawes in his role as the Attendant Spirit. The three major settings of the masque are the “wild Wood” at the outset, actually a location indoors decorated with some foliage (more imaginatively depicted by vivid language); the palace of Comus, in which the tables are “spread with all dainties”; and the outdoors, near the lord president’s castle and within view of the town of Ludlow. These elements of spectacle are incorporated into a plot severely limited by the circumstances of the celebration and by the fact that only six notable players, three of them children of the earl of Bridgewater, participated.”

Within these limitations Milton wrote a masque—actually, it is more a dramatic entertainment—that develops the theme of temperance and its manifestation in chastity. The theme evolves against the three major settings and by reference to the character of the Lady. From the outset of the masque, the Lady is separated from her two brothers in the “wild Wood,” which suggests the mazes and snares that confuse and entrap unwary humankind. Allegorically, the topography signifies the vulnerability of humankind to misdirection, the result of having pursued intemperate appetites rather than the dictates of right reason, or the consequence of having been deceived by an evil character who professes “friendly ends,” the phrase used by Comus in his plans to entrap the Lady. Misled by Comus, who appears to be a “gentle Shepherd” and innocent villager, the Lady travels to his “stately Palace set out with all manner of deliciousness,” where she, while “set in an enchanted chair,” resists the offer to drink from the tempter’s cup. Thereafter, she sits “in stony fetters fixed and motionless” though continuing to denounce the tempter and his blandishments. Despite her immobility, she affirms the “freedom of my mind.” Her brothers “rush in with Swords drawn,” so that Comus is put to flight; and Sabrina, “a Virgin pure” and “Goddess” of the Severn River, sprinkles drops of water on the breast of the Lady to undo the spell of the enchanter. When liberated, the Lady and her brothers “triumph in victorious dance / Over sensual folly and Intemperance.”

The suspense, adventure, and dramatic rescue enhance the conflict between the tempter and his prospective victim. Typically, Milton uses classical analogues to cast light on the situation. The Lady is likened to the goddess of chastity, Diana, who frowned at suggestions of lasciviousness and whose role as huntress made her a formidable adversary, one whose virtue was militant, not passive. The Lady is also likened to Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, on whose shield is pictured one of the Gorgons, whose look would turn one to stone. By analogy, the Lady’s disapproving glance casts dread into lustful men. The classical analogues of the enchanter are best explained by his parentage, Bacchus and Circe. His father is the god of wine and revelry; his mother is the sorceress who turned Ulysses’ mariners into swine when they imbibed the drink that she proffered. In fact, the journey of Ulysses and the temptations encountered by him and his men provide a context in which to understand the travel of the Lady through adversity, her endeavor to withstand temptation, and the reunion that she anticipates.”

These classical analogues and others like them call attention to a moral philosophy that contrasts the lower and higher natures of humankind. Degradation or sublimation, respective inclinations toward vice or virtue, are the opposite impulses adumbrated in the masque. Accordingly, Comus’s followers, having yielded to the vice of intemperance, are degraded so that they appear “headed like sundry sorts of wild Beasts.” They were imbruted when, “through fond intemperate thirst,” they drank from Comus’s cup. Their “foul disfigurement” is a defacement of the “express resemblance of the gods” in the human countenance. With his charming rod in the one hand and the glass containing the drink in the other, Comus is indeed akin to his mother, Circe. Like her, he has attracted a rout of followers, whose antimasque revelry, both in song and dance, suggests a Bacchanal, the sensualistic frenzy associated with his father. Before, during, and after her encounter with Comus, the Lady has a “virtuous mind,” and she is accompanied by “a strong siding champion Conscience,” enabling her to see “pure-eyed Faith,” “white-handed Hope,” and the “unblemished form of Chastity.” In this series of three virtues chastity is substituted for charity, which typically appears along with faith and hope. Milton therefore suggests that chastity and charity are interrelated. Chastity is a form of self-love, not vanity but a wholesome sense of self-worth that enables one to value the spirit over the flesh and to affirm the primacy of one’s higher nature. When viewed from this perspective, chastity is the necessary prerequisite to one’s love of God, not to mention one’s neighbor.”

The moral philosophy of Comus reflects the imprint of Neoplatonism. In the Renaissance, particularly between 1450 and 1600, the works of Plato were reinterpreted and the central ideas emphasized. Beginning in Italy at the Platonic Academy of Florence, Renaissance Neoplatonism eventually spread throughout the Continent and entered the intellectual climate of England. The Renaissance version of Platonism synthesized the ideas of Plato and Plotinus with elements of ancient mysticism, all of which were assimilated, in turn, to Christianity. The fundamental tenet of Renaissance Neoplatonism asserted by Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), one of the foremost intellectuals of the Florentine Academy, is that “the soul is always miserable in its mortal body.” The soul, having descended from the realm of light, strives to return homeward. While on earth, the soul is immersed in the darkness of the human condition and imprisoned in the human body. In effect, the soul and the body are in a state of tension, the one thriving at the other’s expense. When the appetites are denied virtue prevails, and the soul is enriched. When, on the other hand, the appetites of the flesh are indulged, vice predominates, and the soul suffers. The term psychomachia, which means “soul struggle,” designates the inner conflict that one experiences as virtue and vice contend for dominance. The foregoing paradigm is typical of certain Renaissance paintings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Several works of Perugino and Andrea Mantegna, having been influenced by Neoplatonic philosophy, depict the contention between ratio and libido, or reason and desire. These paintings show classical gods and goddesses whose allegorical significance was established. Venus and Cupid embody desire and its attendant vices; Diana and Minerva, to whom the Lady of Comus is likened, signify reason and its accompanying virtues.”

Another tradition that may have contributed to Comus is the morality drama of the late Middle Ages, which uses allegorical characters to present the conflict between the virtues and vices. Furthermore, Edmund Spenser’s allegorical treatment of temperance and chastity in The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) is pertinent to an understanding of Milton’s work. After all, Milton in Areopagitica refers to the “sage and serious poet Spenser,” whom he calls “a better teacher than Scotus and Aquinas, describing true temperance under the person of Guyon.” Much as Sir Guyon’s temperance in book 2 of Spenser’s epic anticipates the Lady’s virtue in Comus, so too Britomart, the female knight in book 3, by her chastity foreshadows the Lady’s heroism. While the depiction of the natural setting in Comus, such as the maze of woods in which the Lady is lost, resembles at times the topography in The Faerie Queene, both English and Continental pastoral dramas of the Renaissance also provide analogues, including John Fletcher‘s Faithful Shepherdess (1610) and Torquato Tasso’s Aminta (1573).”

Within the dynamic conflict between virtues and vices, the role of reason, particularly in maintaining one’s inner liberty, is crucial. If right reason, or recta ratio, enables one to see the light of virtue, then the Lady has a rational and imaginative vision of the Platonic ideals of faith, hope, and chastity, for which she is the earthly embodiment. But when reason is misled by the appetites, it is no longer effective. Upstart appetites gain control of a person in whom the legitimate predominance of reason has been subverted. Such a person in whom right reason no longer functions is enslaved by vice. Inward servitude having been permitted, enslavement by an external captor becomes a sign of one’s loss of self-government. The congruence of inner and outer thralldom is emphasized by Milton in various works, ranging from The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), an antimonarchical tract in which he argues that “bad men” are “all naturally servile,” to Paradise Lost, where in book 12 the archangel Michael explains to Adam that Nimrod has tyrannized others under the sufferance of God, who permits “outward freedom” to be enthralled as a sign and consequence that one is enslaved by “inordinate desires” and “upstart Passions,” which create a condition of effeminacy. Thus, Neoplatonism may be combined with moral philosophy and Christian theology in order to contrast the rational or virtuous freedom of the Lady in Comus with the enslaved state of the enchanter’s followers. Renaissance faculty psychology is also involved because it highlights the interaction of sensory perception, the appetites or passions, reason, and the will.”

Milton himself may be used as a commentator on the contest between virtue and vice in Comus. His private exposition of Christian theology, De Doctrina Christiana (The Christian Doctrine), which was discovered in the nineteenth century and published in 1825, includes a section in which he defines and classifies virtues and vices, then cites scriptural passages, called proof-texts, to substantiate his views. Temperance is “the virtue which prescribes bounds to the desire of bodily gratification.” Under it are “comprehended sobriety and chastity, modesty and decency.” Chastity “consists in temperance as regards the unlawful lusts of the flesh.” Opposed to chastity is effeminacy, which licenses the appetites and promotes sensual indulgence. De Doctrina Christiana may also be used to distinguish the two kinds of temptation at work in Comus: evil and good. In De Doctrina Christiana Milton explains that a temptation is evil “in respect of him who is tempted.” Having yielded to temptation, one suffers the evil effects, enslavement to upstart passions and at times external thralldom, precisely what befall the enchanter’s victims in Comus. A good temptation, on the other hand, is directed at the righteous “for the purpose of exercising or manifesting their faith or patience,” a definition that aptly pertains to the Lady in Comus. Biblical examples, particularly Abraham and Job, are cited in De Doctrina Christiana. The results of good temptation are described as “happy issue,” an assertion supported by a biblical proof-text, James 1:12: “Blessed is the man that endureth temptation; for when he is tried, he shall receive the crown of life.” In Comus, phrases such as “happy trial” and “crown of deathless praise” are succinct references to the good temptation undergone by the Lady and the heavenly reward for her Christian heroism.”

When the rich and diverse contexts surrounding Comus are thus recognized, Milton’s composition becomes more meaningful. Seemingly minor details, including references to birds, fit into the overall design. Snares are mentioned, such as “lime-twigs,” which result from the application of a glutinous substance that prevents a bird from flying away. A bird thus trapped signifies a foolish person enslaved to his or her passions. The virtuous Lady, on the other hand, is described by her elder brother in another way: “She plumes her feathers, and lets grow her wings.” Her freedom to elude Comus’s temptations is signified by her readiness to fly. Flight also connotes her sublimated and rarefied ascent from the human condition. Other verbal images are auditory but at times may involve actual music. Comus and his followers when performing the antimasque revelry create “barbarous dissonance,” whereas verbal imagery suggests that the Lady’s “Saintly chastity” causes “Angels” to communicate with her: “in clear dream and solemn vision” she learns “of things that no gross ear can hear.”

The characterization of the Lady as an exemplar of temperance and chastity and the definition of her Christian heroism acquire focus in two debates, one between the two brothers, the other between the Lady and Comus. The younger brother stresses the pathos of his sister’s situation: she is helplessly and hopelessly lost in the woods and vulnerable to threats from beasts and mankind alike. The elder brother counters his younger brother’s anxieties, arguing that their “sister is not defenceless left” but armed with “a hidden strength,” chastity. In his unfolding exposition of the strength afforded by chastity, the elder brother alludes to Neoplatonism, moral philosophy, Christian theology, faculty psychology, and the other contexts in which the Lady’s defense against the wiles of Comus is more clearly understood.”

In the Lady’s debate with the enchanter the theoretical exposition of the elder brother is translated into action. The debate, reminiscent of Milton’s prolusions at Cambridge, pits the sophistry of Comus against the Lady’s enlightened reasoning, which is informed by her commitment to virtue, specifically temperance and chastity. Comus’s palace, with “all manner of deliciousness” and “Tables spread with all dainties,” is intended to arouse the Lady’s appetites. The intricacies of the debate are manifold, but the essence of Comus’s argument is simply stated: that appetites are naturally licit and innocent when gratified. Having exhibited “all the pleasures” in his palace, Comus alleges that such plenitude or bounty was provided by Nature for the use and consumption of humankind—in particular, to “sate the curious taste.” The Lady, on the other hand, perceives that overindulgence or even exquisite indulgence is unnatural. To pursue one’s appetites without rational self-control is to degrade human nature. Such rebuttal is accompanied by the Lady’s external rejection of the “treasonous offer” of the cup, which signifies licensed passions that would overthrow the predominance of reason. As the debate intensifies, Comus resorts to a form of sophistry in which he reasons by analogy, likening the Lady’s beauty to a coin or comparing her to a “neglected rose.” Much as coins are to be used, so also the Lady’s beauty should be put into circulation. A rose is to be admired, and the Lady likewise is to be appreciated. A corollary of Comus’s argument is that the Lady’s beauty, comparable to a rose, is ephemeral, an allusion to a prevalent theme—”carpe diem,” or seize the day—in seventeenth-century poetry. Comus strives to engender a sense of urgency in the Lady so that she will respond affirmatively and immediately to his overture.”

While Comus’s sophistical arguments and the Lady’s compelling counterarguments are more subtle than the foregoing account suggests, the upshot is that the Lady’s virtue, right reason, and wariness enable her to affirm her “well-governed and wise appetite” while she refutes and debunks the “false rules pranked in reason’s garb” and “dear Wit and gay Rhetoric” of her would-be seducer. The Lady’s “freedom” of mind is manifested while she is physically restrained in the enchanted seat, where she remains immobilized even after her brothers enter with drawn swords to disperse Comus and his followers. When Sabrina, the nymph who is invoked by the Attendant Spirit, emerges from the Severn River and sprinkles drops on the breast of the Lady, the Attendant Spirit’s comment—”Heaven lends us grace”—interprets Sabrina’s presence and gesture as divine assistance, which may be explained theologically. In De Doctrina Christiana Milton comments that natural virtue is elevated to supernatural status only with an infusion of grace from above. Such, indeed, may be the case with the Lady, whose heroism is rewarded by divine approval and whose joyous reunion with her father at the end of the masque anticipates the relationship of the sanctified soul and the Lord in the heavenly hereafter.”

In Areopagitica Milton comments that he “cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary.” Rather, he extols virtue that has undergone “trial ... by what is contrary,” then triumphed. In line with this view, Comus, a theatrical presentation in the Marches or border region between England and Wales, may advance the Lady as an exemplar of the virtue and moral rectitude, not to mention civility, that the lord president seeks to establish in his jurisdiction. As the seat of both the council and the court of the Marches, Ludlow Castle was the central location from which administrative and judicial policy and decisions were issued. Accordingly, the corruptions among the people in the border region—drunkenness, gambling, sexual immorality, witchcraft, and occultism—may suggest the sociopolitical context in which Milton’s masque was composed and the relation of the work to the local populace.”

Despite the early date of composition, Comus is a sophisticated foreshadowing of Milton’s later poetry. The contention between virtue and vice is reenacted in “Lycidas,” Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, and Paradise Regained. Though each poem presents the archetypal conflict somewhat differently, long expositions and debates, or certainly meditations, are crucial in all the works, especially the later ones.”

The second important work written during Milton’s studious leisure is “Lycidas,” a pastoral elegy commemorating Edward King, a fellow student of Milton’s at Christ’s College, Cambridge, who died on 10 August 1637 when a vessel on which he was traveling capsized in the Irish Sea. King, like Milton , was a poet who intended to enter the ministry. Milton’s poem was included in a collection of thirty-five obsequies, Justa Edouardo King (1638), mostly in Latin but some in Greek and English. Justa refers to justments or the due ceremonies and rites for the dead. By writing a pastoral elegy that is heavily allegorical, Milton taps into an inveterate tradition of lament, one that dates back at least to the third century B.C., when poets in Greek Sicily, like Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, presumably initiated the genre. From the pre-Christian era through the Renaissance in Italy, France, and England, pastoral elegies were written by notable authors, including Virgil, Petrarch, Mantuan, Baldassare Castiglione, Pierre de Ronsard, and Spenser. Of the works by these poets, the fifth and tenth eclogues of Virgil’s Bucolics and Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579) were exceptionally influential. As the literary tradition of the pastoral elegy unfolded, certain conventions were established, creating a sense of artificiality that amuses or antagonizes, rather than edifies, some readers, including Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century. Some of the major conventions include the lament by a shepherd for the death of a fellow shepherd, the invocation of the muse, a procession of mourners, flower symbolism, satire against certain abuses or corruptions in society and its institutions, a statement of belief in immortality, and the attribution of human emotions to Nature, which, in effect, also mourns the loss of the shepherd.”

Through the use of such conventions Milton recounts his association with Edward King at Cambridge, likening himself and his friend to fellow shepherds together from early morning, through the afternoon, and into nightfall. Because of their friendship Milton , through the narrator, expresses an urgency, if not compulsion, to memorialize his friend. As a simple shepherd, he will fashion a garland of foliage and flowers to be placed at the site of burial. Allegorically, the garland signifies the flowers of rhetoric woven together into a pastoral elegy. The narrator also expresses modesty and humility concerning his talent to memorialize his friend: “with forced fingers rude” he may “shatter” the leaves of the foliage that he strives to fashion into a garland. The allegorical significance relates to the daunting challenge of crafting a pastoral elegy. The three kinds of foliage cited by the narrator—laurels, myrtles, and ivy—are evergreens, which symbolically affirm life after death. At the same time they are associated with different mythological divinities. The laurel crown of poetry was awarded by Apollo; the love of Venus was reflected in the myrtle; and Bacchus wore a garland of ivy. Signified thereby is the poetry written at Cambridge by King and Milton in imitation of classical Greek and Latin literature. Later in “Lycidas,” when the narrator mentions the “oaten flute” and its “glad sound,” to which “rough satyrs danced” while accompanied by “fauns with cloven heel,” he is alluding to the erotic and festive poetry, perhaps Ovidian, that King and Milton composed as students under the supervision of a tutor at Cambridge.”

Despite the conventions that Milton assimilates to his poem and the artificiality of his pose as a naive shepherd, “Lycidas” is still an outlet for earnest sentiment. The poem is Milton’s endeavor to write a pastoral elegy in order to test his talent, to manifest his proficiency in a genre associated with the most reputable poets, and to signal his readiness to progress to other challenges. But King, who died before he fulfilled his potential as a poet and priest, no doubt reminds Milton of his own mortality. By implication in “Lycidas” and explicitly in other poems, Milton registered concern that his unfolding career as a poet might be interrupted not only by early death but by the failure to progress in his development as a poet or because of failed inspiration. Milton , in short, may be alluding to himself when he complains that Lycidas, who equipped himself “to scorn delights, and live laborious days,” died without having achieved the fame as a poet to which he aspired. While the allusions recount King’s abstemiousness and strict regimen of study, they glance, as well, at Milton’s similar habits. But lament turns to bitterness, so that the narrator in the allegorical framework of the poem impugns God’s justice: “the blind Fury with th’aborred shears” cuts “the thin spun life.” Some critics suggest that Milton erred in his reference to the Furies, whose keen sight—they are by no means “blind”—enables them to serve as agents of divine vengeance. From this vantage point, Milton should have alluded to the Fates—Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos—who spin the thread of life. In particular, Atropos, whose name means “inflexible,” is equipped with shears to cut the thread. The more likely explanation is that Milton conflates the Furies and Fates into one allusion in order to heighten the narrator’s bitterness, which emerges from his misperception that vengeance was misdirected and, therefore, that justice is blind. The narrator’s bitterness is also aroused because he associates the death of Lycidas with that of Orpheus, who was dismembered by the Thracian women. The mythological figure’s remains scattered on the Hebrus River and in the Aegean Sea suggest the route of King’s travel from the River Deva to the Irish Sea.”

Appropriately, Apollo, the classical patron of poetry who intervenes to rectify the shortsightedness of the narrator, distinguishes “broad rumor” from “fame.” Although Lycidas did not achieve earthly renown through “broad rumor,” he was elevated much earlier into the hereafter, where an eternal reward, “fame,” will be conferred on him under the eyes of the godhead. Apollo’s speech, which some critics perceive as a digression, is integral to the poem because it affirms that the godhead is both clear-sighted and just.”

Balancing Apollo’s commentary on the role and reward of the poet is Saint Peter’s perspective on the priesthood. For Milton, King was the ideal clergyman, whose pastoral ministry would have been exemplary. King’s premature death at first appears to be another example of injustice, for the corrupt clergymen and bishops of the Church of England continue to prosper. Against the clergy and most notably the bishops, Milton issues a virtual diatribe, a poetic counterpart of his enraged denunciation of them in the antiprelatical or antiepiscopal tracts. The speaker of the diatribe is “the pilot of the Galilean lake,” Saint Peter. As the principal Apostle, Saint Peter is perceived, in effect, as the first bishop. As the one who wields the keys—”The golden opes, the iron shuts amain,” images that signify, respectively, access to Heaven and incarceration in Hell—Saint Peter functions as the sharp-sighted judge. Inveighing against the bishops as “Blind Mouths!,” Saint Peter thus likens them to tapeworms that infest the sheep. Later they are equated with infectious diseases tainting the flock. Saint Peter’s stern tone anticipates his eventual use of the “two-handed engine at the door,” an instrument of divine justice that he wields in judgment against reprobates. His message, in sum, is that corrupt clergy and bishops may thrive in the present life, but justice will be exacted in the hereafter. In his prose treatises Milton uses the odious term “hireling,” derived from the Gospel of John, to describe a venal clergyman. In John’s Gospel the “hireling” is contrasted with the Good Shepherd, whose faithful service would have been reembodied in King.”

Across the panorama of the poem, the narrator undergoes a change in outlook. At first sorrowful and depressed, he projects his mood onto the landscape. The flowers that he enumerates in a virtual catalogue manifest the human emotion of grief, as well as the ritualistic appearance and gestures of mourning—”Cowslips ... hang the pensive head”; “every flower ... sad embroidery wears”; and “Daffadillies fill their cups with tears.” Later in the poem, when the narrator comes to recognize that Lycidas has been elevated into the heavenly hereafter, his outlook and tone change noticeably. Whereas Lycidas’s “drooping head” has sunk into the waves, the narrator likens this downfall to the sunset, followed by sunrise. Lycidas, like the sun, “tricks his beams” and “flames in the forehead of the morning sky,” enhanced by the sheen of the water. Both fire and water bring about baptismal cleansing so that Lycidas enters Heaven, where he “hears the unexpressive nuptial song,” the intimate union of the sanctified soul and the Lord celebrated in the Book of Revelation. Like the resurrected Christ, Lycidas is finally triumphant and glorified. At the end of the poem most of the biblical allusions that celebrate joy after sorrow are from Revelation.”

Despite its brevity (only 193 lines), “Lycidas“ anticipates a recurrent theme in Milton’s major poems: the justification of God’s ways to humankind. In Paradise Lost, for example, the downfall of Adam and Eve and the introduction of sin and death into the human condition are interpreted from a providential perspective. From this vantage point, the deity is not vengeful but merciful, not misguided or blind but instrumental in humankind’s ultimate triumph. In Samson Agonistes (1671), the downfall of the protagonist results in bitterness toward God. Samson, having been chosen by God to liberate the Israelites from the tyranny of the Philistines, is himself enslaved. By the end of the dramatic poem Samson and others who have impugned God’s justice come to recognize that the “unsearchable dispose” or providential intent is very different from what they had alleged.”

As a capstone to his education at Cambridge and to the years of private study, the twenty-nine-year-old Milton, with an attendant, traveled abroad for fifteen months in 1638-1639, to France but chiefly through Italy. The principal source of information about the grand tour is Milton’s Defensio Secunda. Despite his vocal opposition to Roman Catholicism, while he was abroad Milton fraternized with numerous Catholics, including Lucas Holstenius, the Vatican librarian; presumably Cardinal Francesco Barberini; and Giovanni Battista Manso, the patron of both Giambattista Marini and Tasso. In his poem “Mansus,” Milton , who recognizes the importance of patrons such as Manso, yearns for such friendship and support in order to write a poem about King Arthur. Milton did not compose an Arthuriad, probably because his concept of heroism was very different by the time that he wrote Paradise Lost. In Italy, moreover, Milton viewed numerous works of art that depicted biblical episodes central to his later works—Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, and Paradise Regained. The relationship of the works of art to the visual imagery in the major poems is the subject of much critical commentary. During his stay in Florence, Milton visited the aged and blind Galileo. Having suffered through the Inquisition, Galileo was under virtual house arrest in his later years. In Paradise Lost Milton refers to Galileo’s telescope and to the view of the heavens that it provided. As a victim of persecution, Galileo became for Milton a symbol of the adversity that a spokesperson of the truth underwent. Also in Florence, Milton read his Italian poetry at the academies, where he elicited the plaudits of the humanists for his command of their language. Milton corresponded with his Florentine friends, such as Carlo Dati, after his return to England. Years later, Milton continued to remember his friends at the Florentine academies with intense affection. Before his departure from Italy he shipped home numerous books, including musical compositions by Claudio Monteverdi. From Venice, Milton headed to Geneva. In Italy or in Switzerland, he learned of the deaths of his sister, Anne, and of Charles Diodati. To memorialize Diodati, Milton wrote a pastoral elegy, “Epitaphium Damonis,” in Latin.

After his return to England, Milton assisted in the education and upbringing of Anne’s children, John and Edward Phillips. He also became embroiled in the controversies against the Church of England and the growing absolutism of Charles I. The freedom of conscience and civil liberty that he advocated in his prose tracts were pursued at a personal level in the divorce tracts. Milton married three times; none of the relationships ended in divorce. His first wife, Mary Powell, left Milton shortly after their marriage in summer 1642 in order to return to her parents. This separation evidently motivated the composition of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643). By 1645 they were reunited. Mary died in 1652. His second wife, Katherine Woodcock, whom he married on 12 November 1656, died in 1658. Milton’s third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, whom he married on 24 February 1663, survived him. In addition to his marital woes Milton faced the deaths of his infant son, John, in 1651 and of an infant daughter in 1658. In the same period Milton’s relationship with his three daughters by Mary Powell—Anne, Mary, and Deborah, all of whom survived their father—was troublesome, especially because they did not inherit their father’s interest in and aptitude for learning. Further adversity resulted from his failing eyesight and total blindness by 1652. These adversities, along with Milton’s involvement in politics, may have delayed the composition of the major poetry, and Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, and Paradise Regained surely bear the imprint of Milton’s personal experience and public service.

Milton’s major work, Paradise Lost , was first published in ten books in 1667, then slightly revised and restructured as twelve books for the second edition in 1674, which also includes prose arguments or summaries at the outset of each book. Paradise Lost, almost eleven thousand lines long, was initially conceived as a drama to have been titled “Adam Unparadised,” but after further deliberation Milton wrote a biblical epic that strives to “assert Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men.” To vindicate Providence, Milton attempts to make its workings understandable to humankind. In accordance with epic conventions, he begins his work in medias res. An overview of major characters and their involvement in the action are the prerequisites to further critical analysis. In the first two books the aftermath of the War in Heaven is viewed, with Satan and his defeated legions of angels having been cast down into Hell, a place of incarceration where they are tormented by a tumultuous lake of liquid fire. By the end of the first book they have been revived by Satan, under whose leadership they regroup in order to pursue their war against God either by force or guile. Most of the second book depicts the convocation of the fallen angels in Hell. Rather than continue their warfare directly against God and his loyal angels, they choose to reconnoiter on the earth, the dwelling place of God’s newly created human beings, whose lesser nature would make them more vulnerable to onslaught or subversion. Satan, who volunteers to scout the earth and its inhabitants, departs through the gates of Hell, which are guarded by two figures, Sin and Death. He travels through Chaos, alights on the convex exterior of the universe, then descends through an opening therein to travel to earth. While Satan is traveling, God the Father and the Son, enthroned in Heaven at the outset of book 3, oversee the progress of their adversary. Foreknowing that Adam and Eve will suffer downfall, the Father and the Son discuss the conflicting claims of Justice and Mercy. The Son volunteers to become incarnate, then to undergo the further humiliation of death in order to satisfy divine justice. At the same time his self-sacrifice on behalf of humankind is a consummate act of mercy, one by which his merits through imputation will make salvation possible.

In a soliloquy at the beginning of book 4, a vestige of the dramatic origin of the epic, Satan, having arrived in the Garden of Eden, laments his downfall from Heaven and his hypocritical role in instilling false hope in his followers, whom he misleads into believing that they will ultimately triumph against God. Satan’s first view of Eden and of Adam and Eve arouses his admiration, which is rapidly replaced by his malice and hate for the creator and his creatures. Overhearing the conversation of Adam and Eve, Satan learns that God has forbidden them to partake of the fruit of a certain tree in the Garden of Eden. By the end of book 4 Satan has entered the innermost bower of Adam and Eve while they are asleep. In the shape of a toad at Eve’s ear, he influences her dream. When detected by the good angels entrusted with the security of Eden, Satan reacquires his angelic form, confronts Gabriel, but departs Eden. At the outset of book 5 Eve recounts her dream to Adam. In the dream Satan, who appears as a good angel, leads Eve to the interdicted tree, partakes of the fruit, and invites her to do likewise. Adam counsels Eve that her conduct in the dream is blameless because she was not alert or rational. He concludes his admonition by urging Eve to avoid such conduct when she is awake. Also in book 5 God sends the angel Raphael to visit Adam and Eve, chiefly to forewarn them that Satan is plotting their downfall. Midway through book 5, in response to a question from Adam, Raphael gives an account of the events that led to the War in Heaven.

Book 6 describes the war in detail as the rival armies of good and evil angels clash. Personal combat between Satan and certain good angels, such as Michael, is colorfully rendered, but a virtual stalemate between the armies is the occasion for intervention by the godhead. God the Father empowers the Son to drive the evil angels from Heaven. Mounting his chariot, the Son, armed with thunderbolts, accelerates toward the evil angels and discharges his weaponry. To avoid the onrushing chariot and the wrathful Son, the evil angels, in effect, leap from the precipice of Heaven and plummet into Hell. Also in response to a question from Adam, Raphael provides an account of the seven days of Creation, highlighting the role of the Son, who is empowered by the Father to perform the acts by which the cosmos comes into being, including the earth and its various creatures, most notably humankind. This account takes up all of book 7. In book 8 Adam recalls his first moments of consciousness after creation, his meeting with Eve, and their marriage under God’s direction. Using that account as a frame of reference, Raphael admonishes Adam to maintain a relationship with Eve in which reason, not passion, prevails.

Book 9 dramatizes the downfall of Eve, then Adam. Working apart from Adam, Eve is approached by Satan, who had inhabited the form of a serpent. Led by him to the interdicted tree, Eve yields to the blandishments of the serpent and partakes of the fruit, and the serpent rapidly departs. Eve, having rejoined Adam, gives him some fruit. His emotional state affects his power of reasoning, so that he eats the fruit. Book 10 begins with the Son having descended from Heaven to judge Adam and Eve. Though they are expelled from Eden, his merciful judgment, their contrition, and the onset of grace will eventually convert sinfulness to regeneration. Satan, who retraces his earthward journey to return to Hell, encounters Sin and Death, who had followed him. He urges them to travel to the earth and to prey on humankind. For the last two books of the epic, Adam, having been escorted to a mountaintop by the angel Michael, has a vision of the future. Narrated by Michael, the vision presents biblical history of the Old and New Testaments, with emphasis on the redemptive ministry of Jesus and the availability of salvation to humankind. The vision concludes with a glimpse of the general conflagration at Doomsday, the Final Judgment, and the separation of the saved from the damned in the hereafter.

Milton’s work differs significantly from the epic traditon of Greco-Roman antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. Earlier epics developed ideas of heroism that celebrate martial valor, intense passions such as wrath or revenge, and cunning resourcefulness. If indeed such traits of epic heroism are retained by Milton , they tend to be embodied in Satan. In other words, Milton uses the epic form simultaneously as a critique of an earlier tradition of heroism and as a means of advancing a new idea of Christian heroism for which the crucial virtues are faith, patience, and fortitude. Undoubtedly, this idea of heroism was influenced by Milton’s personal experience with adversity and by his public service as a polemicist and an opponent of Stuart absolutism and the episcopacy of the Church of England. Under attack from his adversaries, Milton , from his perspective, was the advocate of a righteous cause that failed. The triumph of his adversaries, his solitude after the Restoration, and his struggle to understand how and why, under the sufferance of Providence, evil seemingly prevailed—and other questions—presumably impelled him to modify an earlier plan to compose a British epic on Arthur. At the same time, however, one may acknowledge that some traditional traits of epic heroism are embodied in characters such as the Son. Surely wrath and martial effectiveness are manifested in the War in Heaven, but Milton more emphatically affirms that the greater triumph of the Son is his voluntary humiliation on behalf of humankind. Accordingly, faith, patience, and fortitude are the crucial virtues to be exercised by the Son in his redemptive ministry, which he has agreed to undertake because of meekness, filial obedience, and boundless love for humankind.

Heroism is simply one of a series of epic conventions used but adapted by Milton . Another is the invocation of the muse, who is not precisely identified—whether the Holy Spirit or, more generally, the spirit of the godhead. At times, Milton alludes to the classical muse of epic poetry, Urania. The intent, however, is to identify her not as the source of inspiration but as a symbol or imperfect type of the Hebraic-Christian muse through which the divine word was communicated to prophets or embodied in Jesus for dissemination to humankind. A third convention is intrusion by supernatural beings, action that takes place throughout the epic—when, for example, the godhead sends Raphael to forewarn Adam and Eve of the dangers of Satan or when the Son descends to Eden as the judge of humankind after the fall. In Adam’s vision of the future, the Son’s role as the Incarnate Christ and the unfolding of his redemptive ministry are highlights. The descent into the underworld, a fourth epic convention, occurs in Paradise Lost as early as book 1, which shows the punishment of the fallen angels in Hell. A fifth convention is the interrelation of love and war. The love of Adam and Eve before and after their expulsion from Eden is central to the epic, but the self-sacrifice of the Son on behalf of fallen humankind is the most magnanimous example of love. Warfare in Paradise Lost is sensational when the good and evil angels clash and as the Son expels Satan and his followers from Heaven; but the epic develops another form of struggle, humankind’s experience of temptation after Satan conceals his malice behind external friendliness and solicitude. Finally, the style of Paradise Lost, including the extended similes and catalogues, is a sixth epic convention. In book 1 Satan, who had plummeted from Heaven into Hell, is prone on the fiery lake. Across several lines, the narrator compares Satan’s enormous size with that of the Titans. Later in book 1, as the fallen angels file from the burning lake, an epic catalogue is used to cite their names as false gods whose idols were worshiped in infidel cultures, particularly in Asia Minor. Both the similes and catalogues, when examined closely, provide insight into other, but related, aspects of style, such as the Latinate diction and periodic sentence structure, which when accommodated to blank verse create a majestic rhythm, a sense of grandeur, and at times sublimity.

While contributing to Milton’s grand design, each book in the epic has distinctive features. The first book begins with an invocation, and three other books—three, seven, and nine—have similar openings. In all four instances the narrator invokes divine assistance or inspiration to begin or continue his epic poem. Furthermore, the invocations enable the narrator periodically to characterize himself, to announce his aspirations, and to assess his progress in composing the epic. Thus, in the invocation of book 1, the narrator pleads for inspiration comparable to what Moses experienced in his relationship with the Lord. Topography is mentioned, including Horeb and Sinai, the mountains, respectively, where God announced his presence to Moses and gave him the Commandments, and Siloa’s brook, where Christ healed the blind man. By implication the narrator interrelates Hebraic-Christian landscapes with the haunts of the classical muses. With his vision thus illuminated, he hopes to describe events of biblical history. At the same time, he invites comparison with epic writers of classical antiquity; but his work, which treats the higher truth of biblical history and interpretation, will supersede theirs.

After the invocation to book 1, the narrator’s description of Hell incorporates accounts of the volcanic fury of Mt. Aetna, where the leaders of the Titans, Typhon and Briareos, were incarcerated when cast down by Jove’s thunderbolts. Coupled with this analogue and others, including classical descriptions of Hades, is Milton’s adaptation of details from Dante’s Inferno. When, for example, the narrator describes how the fires of Hell inflict pain but do not provide light, the allusion is to Dante. And the lines “Hope never comes / That comes to all,” which describe the plight of the fallen angels, paraphrase the inscription on the gate to Hell in the Inferno: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” In reviving the fallen angels, Satan, upright and with wings outstretched over the fiery lake, resembles the dove brooding on the abyss (book 1) or the Son (book 7) standing above Chaos to utter the words that result in Creation. Satan also parodically resembles Moses, who led his followers away from the threat of destruction. His speeches instill false hope in the angels, who are gulled by his public posturing, but the narrator alerts the reader to Satan’s duplicity. Privately the archfiend is in a state of despair. By the end of book 1 the fallen angels assemble in a palace called Pandemonium to deliberate on a course of action: to pursue the war against God by force or guile. As this convocation begins, Satan is not only the ruler in the underworld but its virtual deity.

Book 2 opens with Satan enthroned above the other angels. The first of the speakers to address the topic of ongoing warfare with God is Moloch, the warrior angel who urges his cohorts to ascend heavenward and to use black fire and thunder as weaponry. Despite his call to action, he recognizes that force will not prevail against God. To disrupt Heaven and to threaten its security, though not military triumphs, are nevertheless vengeful. The second speaker, Belial, debunks the argument of Moloch. Not to endure one’s lot in defeat is a sign of cowardice rather than courage, Belial argues. Moreover, he says, the fiery deluge is not as tumultuous as it was immediately after the expulsion of the fallen angels from Heaven, thus suggesting that God’s ire is remitting. Under these circumstances the fallen angels may become more acclimated to the underworld. By diverting attention from the stated premise of ongoing war against God and by urging the fallen angels to orient themselves toward their present habitat, Belial lays the groundwork for the third speaker, Mammon, who advocates the creation of a kingdom in Hell. To redirect the debate to its fundamental premise of ongoing war, Beelzebub, Satan’s chief lieutenant, intervenes. He mocks the fallen angels, particularly Belial and Mammon, by calling them “Princes of Hell” to indicate where their attention and energies are presently focused. At the same time he knows implicitly that if Moloch, the warrior angel, despairs of military success, then no one will be eager to pursue open war against God. Accordingly, he revives Satan’s earlier suggestion—that the earth and its newly created inhabitants should be assessed and then overcome by force or seduced by guile. After the hazards of travel to the newly created world are described, the fallen angels become silent until Satan agrees to undertake the mission. Seemingly voluntary, the decision is virtually constrained. Recognizing that an antagonistic relationship with God is essential to the pretense that the fallen angels are hopeful rivals, not vanquished foes, Satan revives the possibility of victory on the middle ground of earth. Having agreed to scout the earth, he emphasizes that he will travel alone. By preventing others emboldened by his lead from accompanying him, he reserves the glory for himself.

At the gates of Hell, Satan accosts Death, a wraithlike figure who challenges him. Nearby is Sin, a beautiful woman above the waist but a serpent below, tipped with a deadly sting. Her transmogrification prefigures Satan’s own degradation. As an allegorical figure, she synthesizes Homer’s Circe and Spenser’s Error. In her appearance and interactions with Satan and Death, she dramatizes the scriptural account that uses an image of monstrous birth to describe how Sin and Death emerge from lustful urges, which include both pride and concupiscence (James 1:15). Having recalled that she emerged from Satan’s forehead, an allusion to the birth of Athena from the head of Zeus, Sin incestuously consorts with the archfiend, a relationship that begets Death. What results is an infernal trinity, in which the offspring, Death, even copulates with his mother, Sin. The remainder of the book follows Satan’s journey through Chaos.

The invocation of book 2, like that of book 1, is a petition by the narrator for light or illumination, so that he may report events that occur in Heaven. Having ascended from Hell, through Chaos, to the convex exterior of the universe, the blind narrator likens himself to a bird, particularly the nightingale, which sings in the midst of darkness. He mentions many of the same topographic features—the mountains and waters associated with classical and Hebraic-Christian inspiration—cited in the invocation of book 1. Building on the earlier invocation, in which he courts comparison with earlier epic authors, he acknowledges a desire for fame comparable to that of Homer and Thamyris, a blind Thracian poet. Like the blind prophets of classical antiquity, Tiresias and Phineus, the narrator affirms that his physical affliction is offset by the gift of inward illumination. As he reports the dialogue in Heaven, the narrator develops structural and thematic contrasts between books 2 and 3, not to mention differences between Satan and the Son. The infernal consult, which aimed to bring about the downfall of humankind, is balanced against the celestial dialogue, which outlines the plan of redemption. If Satan is impelled by capital sins, such as hate, envy, revenge, and vainglory, then the opposite virtues are the Son’s meekness, obedience, love, and humility. The interaction of Justice and Mercy is also a central topic of the dialogue, which is interrupted by the Father’s question: Who among the angels “will be mortal” to redeem humankind? The question and the silence that ensues are contrasted structurally and thematically with book 2, when Satan, amid the hushed fallen angels, agrees to risk the threats of Chaos to travel to earth. As the Son volunteers to die on behalf of humankind the dialogue resumes, with emphasis on the imputation of his merits and the theology of atonement. In the meantime Satan, having traveled to the opening in the cosmos, alongside the point at which the world is connected to Heaven by a golden chain, descends. He flies first to the sun, where, by posing as a lesser angel, he acquires directions from Uriel to earth, where he arrives at the top of Mount Niphates in Eden.

Book 4 begins with a soliloquy by Satan, the speech that was to have opened the drama “Adam Unparadised.” At this point the so-called heroic nature of Satan as the archetypal rebel is offset by his candid awareness that downfall was caused by his own ambition; that his repentance is prevented by vainglory, which impelled him to boast to the fallen angels that they would overcome God; and that reconciliation with God, if possible, would lead inevitably to another downfall because of ambition. Satan thus becomes the prototype of the obdurate sinner. As he takes on the shapes of various animals—a cormorant, other predators, a toad, and finally a serpent—Satan’s degradation contrasts markedly with his earlier vainglorious posturing. Satan observes the resemblance of Adam and Eve to their maker, assesses the complementary relationship of male and female, learns of the divine prohibition concerning the Tree of Knowledge, and overhears Eve’s account of her creation, especially her attraction to her self-image reflected from the surface of a pool of water. Led from her reflected image by the voice of God, Eve encountered Adam, to whom she is wed. From the first, she acknowledges her hierarchical relationship with Adam, wherein “beauty is excelled by manly grace.” Appellations that she applies to him, such as “Author” and “Disposer,” reaffirm the relationship, along with her other assessments: “God is thy law, thou mine.” Satan, who becomes a toad at Eve’s ear, influences her dream while she and Adam are asleep in their bower of roses. He regains his shape as an angel when accosted by Gabriel and the other attendants in Eden.

When Eve at the outset of book 5 recounts her dream, it is evident that Satan has appealed to her potential for vainglory, the narcissistic inclinations toward self-love, which when magnified disproportionately would elevate her above Adam. Thus, the appellations that the tempter applies to Eve during her dream—”Angelic Eve” and “Goddess”—may engender in her the psychology of self-love and pride, precisely what brought about Satan’s downfall. Much as Satan challenged his hierarchical relationship with God, so too Eve is tempted to question her subordination to Adam. Dividing Book 5 in half is the visit by Raphael, who descends to earth at the behest of God to forewarn Adam and Eve of the wiles of the tempter. In his account of hierarchy, which is a discourse on the great chain of being, Raphael emphasizes how “by gradual scale sublimed” humankind, through continuing obedience, will ascend heavenward. His discourse, an apt commentary on Eve’s dream, particularly the temptation to disobedience, prepares for the account of Satan’s rebelliousness, the occasion for the emergence of Sin from the archfiend. The context for Satan’s rebellion is the so-called begetting of the Son, which does not refer to his origin as such but to his newly designated status as “Head” of the angels or to his first appearance in the form and nature of an angel. The latter possibility is the more likely because Satan’s hate and envy would emerge from his subordination to a being like himself, at least in external appearance. Having summoned numerous angels to a location in the northern region of Heaven, ostensibly to celebrate the begetting of the Son, Satan argues that God’s action is an affront to the dignity of the angels. One of the angels, Abdiel, refutes Satan’s argument. He contends that the manifestation of the Son as an angel is not a humiliation of the godhead but an exaltation of the angelic nature. Such an argument anticipates the eventual Incarnation of the Son, who unites his deific nature with the human nature. In both instances, with the Son having manifested himself in lesser natures, the solicitude of the deity for angels and humankind alike is paramount.
Approximately one-third of the angels rally behind Satan, who leads them in the three-day War in Heaven, the subject of book 6. Typical epic encounters include the personal combat of Satan and Abdiel, then Satan and Michael, not to mention the large-scale clashes of angels. On the dawn of the third day, a situation that prefigures the glorification of Christ at the Resurrection, the Son as the agent of the Father’s wrath speeds in his chariot toward the evil angels. His onrush, accompanied by lightning and a whirlwind, suggests the chariot of Ezekiel. Having described the wrathful godhead in the War in Heaven, Raphael balances this terrifying example by presenting a picture of the benevolent and bountiful deity in book 7. First, however, the narrator in the invocation alludes to his work’s half-finished state, expressing anxiety that his inspiration may be interrupted or that his personal safety is threatened. Through the narrator, Milton perhaps alludes to his own situation at the Restoration, his intercessors presumably having negotiated an agreement that spared his life, so long as he observed certain conditions. After the invocation, book 7 includes an account of Creation, which elaborates on the catalogues of Genesis to highlight how the plenitude, continuity, and gradation are manifestations of God’s benevolence. Most significant is the interactive relationship of male and female principles in Nature—for example, the sun’s rays against the earth—a model for the union of Adam and Eve.

Across books 5-7, the begetting of the Son, Satan’s sinfulness, the War in Heaven, and Creation are episodes that build toward a pointed commentary by Raphael on the relationship of Adam and Eve. Adam, however, first gives an account of his creation, the first moments of his consciousness, and his marriage to Eve. Whereas Eve was led shortly after her creation by the voice, not by the visible presence, of the Lord, Adam at his creation first experiences the warmth of sunlight, falls asleep, and in a dream is led by a “shape Divine” toward the summit of the Garden of Eden. When he awakens, he views among the trees his “Guide” or “Presence Divine,” who speaks to Adam: “Whom thou sought’st, I am.” This disclosure is comparable to what the Lord from the bush on Horeb uttered to Moses. Adam’s recognition of “single imperfection” moves him to request a helpmate, who is created from his side. At once in his relationship with Eve, Adam experiences “passion” and “commotion strange,” which cause Raphael to warn him not to abandon rational control. Discoursing on the hierarchy of reason and passion, the distinction between love and lust, and the scale or ladder along which humankind is to ascend heavenward, Raphael, by conflating Neoplatonic philosophy and traditional Christian theology, amplifies the context in which to understand obedience and disobedience.

The invocation of book 9 recapitulates Milton’s earlier plans to write an epic on “hitherto the only argument / Heroic deemed”: the exploits of “fabled knights,” like Arthur. As an index of his departure from epic tradition, Milton , through his narrator, argues that “the better fortitude / Of patience and heroic martyrdom,” previously “Unsung,” will distinguish his work. After the invocation the narrator describes how Satan, who enters as a serpent, utters a soliloquy (“O foul descent!”) that laments his degradation, an outlook that contrasts with the Son’s willingness to inhabit the nature and form of humankind. Because he is implementing a strategy of deception, Satan conceals his true nature behind a disguise; whereas the Son by becoming human intends to reveal and implement the divine plan of salvation.

In her first speech to Adam in book 9 Eve proposes that she and Adam “divide” their “labors” because their mutual affection has diverted them from their duties of gardening. Adam counters her proposal by affirming that he and Eve when together are “More wise, more watchful, stronger.” Despite the cogency of his argument, Adam twice urges Eve to “Go,” thereby forfeiting his responsibility to issue a lawful command for Eve to remain with him, a command that she would be free to obey or disobey. The topic of a lawful command recurs at the end of book 9, when during their mutual recrimination Eve faults Adam: “why didst not thou, the head, / Command me absolutely not to go ... ?” Agreeing to reunite with Adam by noon, Eve works alone among the roses, propping up the flowers with myrtle bands. Ironically, the very duty of gardening that she performs should bring to mind her relationship with Adam, from whom she is separated. Satan is pleased to have found her alone. Eve’s beauty momentarily awes Satan, who is rendered “stupidly good,” a phrase suggesting that he is disarmed of his enmity. In his approach to Eve the serpent/tempter seeks to re-create in her the psychology of transcendence, which he had engendered during her dream. Feigning submissiveness and awe because of her beauty, Satan deceives Eve into believing that his power of reasoning derives from the forbidden fruit. Characterizing God as a “Threatener” and “Forbidder” who denies the fruit to others to prevent them from becoming his equals, the serpent/tempter capitalizes on Eve’s unwariness, influences her perception, and thus affects her will. Having engorged the forbidden fruit, Eve for a time contemplates possible superiority over Adam; but fearful that death may overtake her and that Adam would be “wedded to another Eve,” she resolves to share the fruit with him. As he was awaiting the return of Eve, Adam had fashioned a garland of roses. Astonished to learn at their reunion that Eve violated the divine prohibition, he drops the wreath, which withers. This dramatic event foreshadows the process of dying that will be introduced into the human condition as a consequence of the downfall of Adam and Eve. Whereas Eve was deceived by the tempter, Adam is “overcome with Female charm,” a reaction whereby judgment gives way to passion, precisely the concern that Raphael had expressed at the end of book 8. Not unlike the phantasmic experience of Eve’s dream, Adam and Eve undergo illusory ascent, then sudden decline. With the onset of concupiscence, moreover, their lustful relationship contrasts with the previous expression of love in their innermost bower. Besieged by turbulent passions, Adam and Eve become involved in mutual recrimination, each faulting the other for their downfall, both denying culpability.
At the outset of book 10 the Father sends the Son to earth as “the mild Judge and Intercessor both,” as one who will temper justice with mercy. Despite the retribution meted out to Adam and Eve, the greater emphasis of the Son’s ministry is to encourage an awareness of sinfulness and the onset of sorrow and contrition as steps in the process of regeneration. Satan, who has begun to return to Hell, where with the fallen angels he plans to revel in his triumph over humankind, meets Sin and Death, who traveled earthward in the wake of his earlier journey. He urges them to prey on Adam and Eve and all their progeny. Though Adam and Eve have continued their mutual recrimination, each eventually acknowledges responsibility for sinfulness. Despite their evident frailties and imperfections, Adam and Eve are neither victims nor victors. Having been created “Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall,” they are endowed with the capability to withstand temptation; but when they suffer downfall, they cannot undergo regeneration without divine assistance. Their predicament, which typifies the human condition, provides the context for the Christian heroism of Milton’s epic. When measured in relation to humankind, heroism is manifested as one resists temptation in the manner of the Lady of Comus or when one, having yielded to temptation, experiences regeneration.

Books 11 and 12 include Adam’s dream vision of the future, which is narrated by the angel Michael, who presents a panoramic overview of the implementation of the divine will in human history. As Adam views Hebraic and Christian biblical history, the prophets and patriarchs of the Old Testament, such as Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and Joshua, are presented as “shadowy Types,” prefiguring the Son’s incarnate ministry of redemption. Interspersed with descriptions of the Old Testament types are accounts of evildoers, such as the tyrant Nimrod. The cyclical interaction of goodness and evil, which continues under the sufferance of Providence, is the context wherein obedience and heroism are manifested, for which Christ is the perfect exemplar. Indeed, the Pauline view that Jesus was obedient even unto death on the cross is the Christian heroism at the center of Adam’s dream vision. In addition to its typological emphasis, the vision of human history in books 11 and 12 is also apocalyptic, with focus on the Second Coming, when the final victory over Satan will occur and the union of sanctified souls with the godhead will take place in the heavenly hereafter. More immediate for Adam and Eve, however, is their expulsion from Eden and the change in their perception of Paradise—from an external garden to “A paradise within,” which results from the indwelling of the godhead in one’s heart.

Because of its length, complexity, and consummate artistry, Paradise Lost is deemed Milton’s magnum opus, the great work for which he had prepared himself since youth and toward which, in his view, the godhead guided him. As a biblical epic, Paradise Lost is an interpretation of Scripture: a selection of biblical events, their design and integration according to dominant spiritual themes—downfall and regeneration, the presentation of a Christ-centered view of human history, a virtual dramatization of the phenomenon of temptation to create psychological verisimilitude, and final affirmation about personal triumph over adversity and ultimate victory over evil. Imprinted in the epic are Milton’s personal and political circumstances: his blindness, on the one hand, and the dissolution of the Protectorate, on the other. Thus, Milton may have identified himself with intrepid spokespersons who advocated a righteous cause despite the adversity confronting them. Such figures include Abdiel, whose “testimony of Truth” is the single refutation of Satan and the fallen angels in book 5, and Noah, the “one just man” who, while surrounded by reprobates, continues to advocate the cause of goodness. Though evil may be ascendant for a time, including the Stuart monarchy at the Restoration, goodness in the cyclical panorama of history will have its spokesperson and, ultimately, will prevail.

After Paradise Lost Milton’s two major works are Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, published in the same volume in 1671. As such, the works may be perceived as complementary, if not companion, pieces on the topic of temptation. The Christ of Paradise Regained successfully withstands the temptations of Satan in the desert, whereas Samson, who yields to temptation earlier in his career, undergoes the cycle of spiritual regeneration. Like the Lady in Comus, the Christ of Paradise Regained heroically refutes his tempter. Like Adam in Paradise Lost, Samson manifests his heroism in recovery after downfall.

If Paradise Lost treats “man’s disobedience,” then Paradise Regained presents Christ, whose human nature is emphasized, as the example of consummate obedience. The work, approximately one-fifth the length of Paradise Lost, is divided into four books. In the first book, after the Holy Spirit is invoked, Satan overhears the announcement by the Father, “the great proclaimer,” that Christ is his “beloved Son.” At Satan’s command a convocation of the fallen angels is held in “mid air,” after which the tempter travels earthward to use his wiles in order to learn the identity of Christ. His fear is that Christ fulfills the prophecy that “Woman’s seed” will inflict the “fatal wound” on him. Christ enters the desert, where he cogitates on the Old Testament prophecies of his coming, the earlier events of his life, and his role in the divine plan of redemption. After Christ has been in the wilderness for forty days, the tempter, disguised as an old man, accosts him. Urging him to convert stones into bread so that the two of them can alleviate their hunger, Satan is refuted by Christ, who acknowledges that he is being tempted to “distrust” God. In book 2 the absence of Christ troubles especially his mother. Satan in the meantime has convoked the fallen spirits in order to plan a more subtle seduction, which will begin with a temptation of food, then proceed to an appeal to one’s desire for “honor, glory, and popular praise.” Christ, who experiences hunger, dreams of food; when he awakens, he beholds “A table richly spread.” Rejecting the “guiles” of the tempter, Jesus also dismisses materialism and worldly power, symbolized by the scepter: “who reigns within himself, and rules / Passions, Desires, and Fears, is more a King.”

By the third book Satan is focusing on fame and glory, but Christ rejects earthly fame as false, decrying military heroes and extolling spiritual heroism. From a high mountain Christ views ancient kingdoms, over which he could become the ruler by commanding the numberless troops that he also sees. Christ remains unmoved by “ostentation.” Continuing the temptation in book 4, Satan shows Christ the Roman Empire, of which he could become the benevolent sovereign. Jesus, however, notes that “grandeur and majestic show” are transitory, whereas “there shall be no end” to his kingdom. Thereafter Satan presents him with a view of the whole world, a temptation that Jesus rejects outright. Still endeavoring to tempt Jesus with glory, Satan offers him the total learning of Greek antiquity—art, philosophy, and eloquence. By such gifts he would be equipped to rule the world. Christ dismisses Greek learning because his own direct knowledge of the Lord is the higher truth. While Jesus sleeps, Satan strives unsuccessfully to trouble him with dreams and a storm. The climax of the work occurs when Satan, having brought Christ to the pinnacle of the temple of Jerusalem, tells him to stand or to cast himself down so that angels will rescue him. Christ’s rebuke causes the tempter to flee. Angels then minister to Jesus, who by resisting temptation has begun the liberation of humankind from the wiles of the devil to which Adam had succumbed.

Milton follows the order of the temptations outlined in the Gospel of Luke, rather than in Matthew. Despite the focus on the trial in the desert, Milton interrelates this experience of the Son to earlier and later biblical history. Thus, Christ meditates on the events of his childhood and youth but also remembers Old Testament biblical prophecy that anticipates the coming of the Messiah. Furthermore, God the Father announces his intention to “exercise” Christ in the desert, where “he shall first lay down the rudiments / Of his great warfare” in preparation for his conquest over “Sin and Death” at the Crucifixion and Resurrection. At the same time the patience, faith, and fortitude that Christ manifests in the desert perfect the previous exercise of similar virtues by Old Testament precursors, notably Job, who is cited by Christ in one of his refutations of Satan. From this perspective the Book of Job is another biblical source of Milton’s so-called brief epic. Perhaps Milton was also modeling the trials and triumphs of Jesus after Spenser’s account of Sir Guyon in book 2 of The Faerie Queene, where a demonic figure tests the knight with temptations of materialism, worldly power, and glory. Christs Victorie and Triumph in Heaven and Earth (1610) by Giles Fletcher the Younger is another model possibly adapted by Milton.

When one considers the grand scale across which the action of Paradise Lost takes place—in Hell, Chaos, Heaven, the Cosmos, and Earth—Paradise Regained seems both limited and limiting in its outlook. When one recalls the grand events of Paradise Lost—from the War in Heaven to the Creation—what occurs in Paradise Regained appears to be static. Furthermore, the dramatic elements of Paradise Lost, such as motives for action, suspense, and conflict, excite the reader and encourage both intellectual and psychological responses. In Paradise Regained, on the other hand, the tempter is doomed to failure from the start because Christ does not heed the temptations at all but rejects them outright, with little or no internal conflict. Probably Milton is depending on the contrast between Christ’s wholesale dismissal of the temptations and the more engaged response by the reader, who is perhaps allured by the attractiveness of earthly glory. In his exercise of perfect obedience and of virtues such as faith, patience, and fortitude, Christ is the exemplar after whom we model our own conduct.

Though Paradise Regained lacks the grand and spectacular events of Milton’s longer epic, its purpose is vastly different. Milton’s plan is to provide a context for philosophical meditation and debate by Christ, who, at the outset of his public ministry, is being equipped for his role as the Savior. As such, Christ meditates on the significance of the two natures, divine and human, united in him. The drama of the brief epic derives in part from the tension in Christ between these two natures and the questions that emerge therefrom—how divine omniscience is balanced against human reasoning, why suffering is the prelude to triumph, and when Providence should rectify the misperceptions of the people, who expect the Messiah to be an earthly conqueror. While it is a foregone conclusion that Satan will not succeed with his wiles, the meditations of Christ and the debates with his adversary enable him to reconcile his two natures, to develop his message to the people, and to prepare for public service as a preacher and exemplar. Related to these perspectives is the tension between the ongoing relationship of Christ with the other divine persons and his disengagement from them after he becomes incarnate. Though the Father and the Spirit manifest themselves at the baptism of the Son in order to affirm his divinity in spite of his humanity, afterward the Son enters the human condition as fully as possible to enact his role as the suffering servant. This role, which becomes evident to him in the wilderness, culminates with his death on the cross.

If suffering, temptation, and heightened self-perception are characteristic of Paradise Regained, they are equally significant in Samson Agonistes, a dramatic poem not intended for stage performance. Using the Book of Judges as his chief source, Milton refocuses the saga of Samson in order to emphasize regeneration after downfall, rather than sensational feats of physical strength. Beginning the work with Samson’s degradation as a prisoner in a common workhouse in Gaza, Milton portrays a psychologically tormented character, confused about his downfall and at times antagonistic toward the godhead. Throughout the work a chorus of Danites from Samson’s tribe both observe his plight and speak with him. Three successive visitors also converse with Samson: Manoa, his father; Dalila, his wife; and Harapha, a Philistine giant. In the course of these three visits Samson acquires gradual, not complete, understanding of himself and of his relationship with the godhead. With the departure of Harapha, the change in Samson is noticeable to the chorus, which praises his psychological resurgence from a state of acute depression and his faith in the higher, though obscure, workings of Providence. The poem concludes with Samson in the theater of Dagon, collapsing its pillars of support so that the falling structure kills more of his adversaries than he has slain cumulatively in the past. He himself is killed in the process.

One of the chief ironies of Milton’s rendition is that Samson, though physically strong, is spiritually weak. After he becomes a captive of the Philistines, a consequence and manifestation of his having yielded to temptation, he gradually undergoes spiritual regeneration, which culminates in his renewed role as God’s faithful champion against the Philistines. Within the framework of temptation and regeneration Milton recasts the concept of heroism, debunking or at least subordinating feats of strength to the heroism of spiritual readiness, the state in which one awaits God’s call to service. In line with this outlook the structure of the work and the developing characterization of Samson are discernible. At the outset Samson is tormented by the irony of his captivity. The would-be liberator is himself enslaved. He questions the prophecy to his parents that they would beget an extraordinary son “Designed for great exploits.” At first Samson laments the contrast between his former, seemingly heroic, status and his present state of captivity and degradation. He and others recall his past feats: slaying a lion, dislodging and transporting the gates of Gaza, and slaughtering vast numbers of Philistines with only the jawbone of an ass.

As the poem progresses Samson’s self-knowledge increases, and he comes to realize that “like a petty God” he “walked about admired of all,” until “swollen with pride into the snare” he fell. This realization, as it gradually develops in Samson, is crucial to his self-knowledge and to the understanding of his relationship with God. Samson and others, such as the chorus and Manoa, have questioned, indeed impugned, Providence, likening God’s justice to the wheel of fortune, which is turned blindly. They allege that God, after having chosen Samson to be his champion, inexplicably rejected him. Samson believes that he is alienated from God. As the poem unfolds it first becomes evident to the reader, rather than to the characters, that God had guided Samson into an encounter with the woman of Timna in order to warn his champion of the dangers of pride. In particular, Samson married the woman of Timna, a Philistine, who cajoled him until he disclosed the secret of a riddle that he had posed to the thirty groomsmen at his wedding. When he yields the secret of the riddle to her, she divulges it to the groomsmen. Despite God’s plan to use this episode as a warning, Samson continues to be blinded by pride so that he falls into the snare of Dalila. Thus, his external blinding by the Philistines aptly signifies Samson’s benighted spiritual state. In Milton’s poem, moreover, Dalila is not simply a concubine, her role in Scripture, but Samson’s wife. This point emphasizes the parallel between the woman of Timna and Dalila, though the essential difference is that Samson violates divine prohibition when he reveals the secret of his strength to Dalila. The marital relationship of Samson and Dalila also enables Milton to suggest contrasts with the conjugal union of Adam and Eve. Whereas Samson rejects Dalila, Adam and Eve pursue their regeneration cooperatively.

After his downfall, therefore, Samson must clarify his perception in order to begin the process of regeneration. By recognizing that pride was the cause of his downfall, Samson becomes contrite. In the course of his trials, which involve both physical affliction and psychological torment, Samson exercises patience, faith, and fortitude until he regains the state of spiritual readiness that will enable him to serve as an instrument of God. Ironically, no one, not even Samson, believes that he will again be called to service by God.

The three visitors Manoa, Dalila, and Harapha function unwittingly—another source of irony—to assist Samson in the process of regeneration. Paternal solicitude impels Manoa to negotiate with the Philistines for his son’s liberation. If their desire for revenge against Samson is satisfied, Manoa believes, the Philistines may release his son. He does not recognize that enslavement by the Philistines is simply a sign of Samson’s inward thralldom to sinful passions. Nor does he recognize that God’s justice, rather than Philistine revenge, is to be satisfied and that Samson’s suffering is both a means of divine retribution and a source of wisdom. Dalila, who seeks by various arguments to elicit Samson’s forgiveness and to persuade him to be reunited with her, is rejected wholesale. In short, a measure of his progress is that Samson, who previously yielded to Dalila, resists her wiles.

Of all three visitors, Dalila is perhaps the most important because of past and present relationships with Samson. In his earlier relationship with Dalila, Samson recalls, he was “unwary” so that her “gins and toils” ensnared him. He likens her to a “bosom snake,” suggesting that she had gained access to, and influence over, his innermost being. Though it has been anticipated by the woman of Timna, Samson calls Dalila’s betrayal of him both “Matrimonial treason” and “wedlock-treachery.” To describe his present rejection of Dalila, Samson resorts to classical allusions. He shuns her “fair enchanted cup” and remains impervious to her “warbling charms,” thereby likening her to Circe and the Sirens, respectively. In his encounter with Dalila, Samson for the first time is gratified, rather than displeased, by the contrast between his past status and his present self. Another way of perceiving Samson’s relationships with Dalila is by reference to Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana. When Samson yielded to Dalila, he experienced evil temptation; as he resists her, he exercises virtue in the course of good temptation. Additionally, the rage that Dalila elicits in Samson carries over to his encounter with Harapha, who expects to see a crestfallen captive. Instead, Samson challenges the Philistine giant, who retreats.

The climax of the poem occurs when Samson, at first unwilling to attend the activities at the theater of Dagon, the Philistine idol, is impelled by “rousing motions” to go there. Initially, Samson feared that he would be publicly humiliated when performing feats of strength to entertain the Philistines; but his faith in the higher, though obscure, plan of Providence is rewarded not simply by the impulsion to attend the Dagonalia but by the inner light. “With inward eyes illuminated,” Samson, who becomes aware of the divine will, exercises his volition in concert with it by collapsing the pillars that support the theater of Dagon. Significantly, Samson’s death is described more as a resurrection, whereby he is likened to the phoenix that emerges from the conflagration at its funeral pyre. Finally, the fame that Samson achieves by his renewed spiritual readiness and service as God’s agent transcends his previous glory from feats of strength and slaughter of the Philistines. After all, he is included among the heroes of faith celebrated in the Epistle to the Hebrews.

Not to be overlooked are the political dimensions of the poem, at times counteracting the more traditional outlook on Samson. The saga of Samson may allegorize the heroic ambitions and failings of the Puritan revolution, and his demise, rather than a sign of heroism, may be the product of self-delusion. Samson Agonistes may also emerge from Milton’s personal and political circumstances—his blindness and his role during the rise and fall of a political movement in Britain toward which providential intent was obscure.

If Milton conceived of his dramatic poem after the manner of Greek tragedy, the resemblance is clearcut. The unities of time, place, and action are observed. The poem begins at dawn and ends at noon on the same day. The single place for the action is the workhouse, where, after the destruction of the Philistines, a messenger gives an account of the catastrophe. The action centers on Samson’s spiritual regeneration, culminating in his heroism. Because of Samson’s death and victory, the poem combines features of classical tragedy and Christian drama of regeneration, for which the saga of Samson is a Hebraic prefiguration. When Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes are juxtaposed in their probable order of composition, the threefold arrangement, a virtual triptych, depicts Old Testament types—Adam and Samson—yielding to temptation, then undergoing regeneration; Christ’s triumph over the tempter is the New Testament antitype at the center.
Milton’s influence in later eras derives from his prose and his poetry. His treatises against various forms of oppression and tyranny have elicited admiration in many quarters and in different eras. In fact, his influence as a political writer was felt in the American, French, and Russian revolutions, when he was cited to justify the opposition to monarchs and absolutists. Among the English Romantics, Milton was extolled as a libertarian and political revolutionary. His refusal to compromise on matters of principle, his blindness, and his punishment after the Restoration have caused many admirers to cite Milton as a model of the spokesperson of truth and of someone who pursues idealism despite adversity.

Milton’s reputation as one of the finest English poets was widespread soon after his death in 1674. While most of the critical attention was directed at Paradise Lost, it is essential to realize that his other works drew extensive commentary. In 1712 Joseph Addison devoted eighteen Spectator papers to Paradise Lost—six general essays and twelve others, one on each book of the epic. At times the outlook on Milton as a poet reflected the biases of the commentators. In the eighteenth century, for example, Tories and Anglicans had little admiration for him, but the Whigs were laudatory. Interestingly, Paradise Lost was cited for its contributions to the teaching of traditional Christianity because most interpreters were inattentive to possible implications in the epic that the Son might be subordinate to the Father. Also at the center of attention in the eighteenth century were the grandeur and sublimity of the poem. By the nineteenth century the critical outlook shifted to technical and stylistic features of the verse; but the Romantic admirers of the figure of Satan in Paradise Lost, including William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley , implicitly attacked the traditional theological and philosophical ideas in the work. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Milton’s reputation as a poet becomes quite complex. For a time, in fact, Milton fell into disrepute because of T. S. Eliot ‘s adverse comments decrying the artificiality of his verse.

More recently, Paradise Lost, in particular, has been at the center of rich and diverse critical commentary. The theology of the epic, its indebtedness to works of classical antiquity, its adaptation of Scripture and the Genesis tradition, its Christian humanism, its political overtones, and its varied perspectives on gender relations—these and other topics are explored and debated. Even Milton’s reputation as a misogynist has been challenged by feminists, who perceive tension in the Genesis tradition and in Paradise Lost between the orthodox hierarchical relationship of Adam and Eve and their reciprocal or complementary interaction, especially after their downfall and through their regeneration. Such commentary and the controversies that it ignites demonstrate that Milton’s poetry, like his prose, has durability and applicability beyond the era in which it was composed. It is not simply of an age but for all time.

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John Milton, (1608–1674), poet and polemicist, was born at 6.30 a.m. on Friday 9 December 1608 in the house at the sign of the Spread Eagle, Bread Street, London, and baptized in nearby All Hallows Church on 20 December, the third child of John Milton (1562–1647), and his wife, Sara, née Jeffrey (c.1572–1637). The house in Bread Street accommodated the scrivener's business of Milton's father, and was also the family home. The most remarkable feature of the domestic life of Milton's childhood was music: Milton's father was a composer, and the music that he wrote was designed for performance in private houses, without an audience. Milton grew up in a household in which music was performed, and his skills as a singer in consorts and as a player of the organ and the bass viol were acquired as a child in Bread Street.

Education
Milton was initially educated at home by private tutors, including Thomas Young, a Scottish schoolmaster who eventually became master of Jesus College, Cambridge. In Ad patrem ('To my Father') Milton was later to express his gratitude that his father had paid for lessons in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, and Italian. It is likely that instruction in these languages began with private tutors; although Milton went on to study the ancient languages at school, modern languages were not taught in schools, and all of Milton's instruction in French and Italian (and possibly Spanish) was given by private tutors. At an unknown date between 1615 and 1621 Milton became a pupil at nearby St Paul's School; the most likely date is 1620, when the departure of Thomas Young for a pulpit in Hamburg may have prompted the decision to send Milton to school. At St Paul's, Milton was taught by Alexander Gil the elder and became a friend of Alexander Gil the younger and of Charles Diodati. A lifetime later, Milton's widow told John Aubrey that Milton was a poet at the age of ten. None of Milton's extant poems can be assigned to this date, but a few of his schoolboy juvenilia survive, including an imitation of Mantuan entitled Apologus de rustico et hero ('The Fable of a Peasant and his Master') and a Greek epigram, Philosophus ad regem quendam ('A philosopher to a certain king'). About 1874 a page (now in Austin, Texas) apparently in Milton's youthful hand came to light, and it contains a prose theme on early rising and two Latin poems. Milton's earliest datable poems are English paraphrases of psalms 114 and 136; when Milton printed them in 1645 he said that they 'were done by the Author at fifteen years old', which was in 1624.

Early in 1625 Milton arrived in Cambridge, perhaps in time for the start of the Lent term on 13 January. On 12 February, on payment of 10s., he was admitted to Christ's College as a minor pensioner, a status below that of fellow-commoner but above that of sizar. The tutor to whom he was assigned was William Chappell, who was later to become provost of Trinity College, Dublin. On 9 April 1625 Milton presented himself to James Tabor, the university registrary, and formally matriculated at the university. Undergraduates did not necessarily return home during the university vacations, and it is likely that Milton stayed in college after term ended on 8 July, because a plague epidemic had broken out in London; when plague arrived in Cambridge at the beginning of August, Milton presumably left Cambridge to join his family at a retreat in the country. This outbreak of plague may be the 'slaughtering pestilence' to which Milton refers in his poem 'On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of the Cough'; if so, the poem would seem to have been written in the winter of 1625–6. Alternatively, the subject of the poem may, as Edward Phillips recalled many years later, be Milton'sniece (and Edward's sister) Anne, who died in January 1628, aged two.

Milton's earliest Latin poem from this period is a verse letter (later Elegia prima) addressed to his friend Charles Diodati, which seems to have been written from London early in April 1626, shortly before Milton returned to Cambridge. The deaths of four dignitaries in the autumn of 1626 offered occasions for Milton to venture into Latin memorial verse. Lancelot Andrewes, the distinguished scholar and divine, died on 25 September; Milton's commemorative poem (later Elegia tertia) for the celibate Andrewes ends with a startling adaptation of a line from Ovid (Amores, i.5) in which Ovid recalls an assignation with Corinna. On 26 September Richard Ridding, one of the university's esquire bedells, died, and Milton joined in the academic mourning with a memorial poem which he subsequently printed as Elegia secunda; 5 October brought the death of Nicholas Felton, who had succeeded Andrewes as bishop of Ely, and Miltononce again used the occasion to compose a Latin poem. On 21 October Cambridge lost its vice-chancellor, John Gostlin, master of Gonville and Caius College and regius professor of medicine (‘physic’), and once again Milton marked the occasion with a poem. It may have been in the same term that Milton turned his pen to vindictive anti-Catholic polemic in a series of Latin poems on the occasion of the Gunpowder Plot. Milton's contributions to the university celebrations of the defeat of the conspirators were the tiny verse-epic In quintum Novembris ('On the fifth of November'), four epigrams In Proditionem Bombardicam ('On the Gunpowder Plot'), and a fifth, In inventorem bombardae ('On the inventor of gunpowder'); the verse epic contains Milton's first portrayal of Satan.

The only remnants of Milton's prose to survive from this period are a Latin letter to Thomas Young and a collection of Latin academic exercises known as prolusions. The letter to Young was written on 26 March 1627; it was later printed as the first letter in Milton's Epistolares familiares ('Private letters'), but misdated as 26 March 1625. In this letter Milton alludes to a companion poem, which must be his verse letter to Young(later Elegia quarta). Six of Milton's seven Latin prolusions are speeches that he delivered to meet the academic requirements of the university and his college; four (1, 2, 3, and 7) are orations (declamationes) and two (4 and 5) are Milton's half of formal debates (disputationes). Prolusions 2, 3, and 5 were read in the 'Public Schools' (university lecture rooms, now known as ‘Old Schools’), and prolusions 1, 4, and 7 were read in Christ's College. Prolusion 6 is not part of the statutory exercises, but is rather an address to Milton's fellow students at an entertainment (known as a ‘salting’) on the eve of the long vacation; this prolusion, which Milton delivered on or shortly before 4 July 1628, is preceded by a Latin oration addressed to his fellow students and followed by an English poem, 'On the Vacation Exercise'. This prolusion also contains the first reference to Milton's nickname, ‘the Lady’: just as the young Virgil (parthenias vulgo appellatus sit'was usually called the Lady'), so Milton became known as ‘the Lady of Christ's’.

On 25 May and 11 June 1627 Milton was in London, where he signed two legal documents. These absences from Cambridge during term time suggest that this may be the term when he fell out with Chappell and was consequently sent down from the university. This period of suspension (or rustication) in London may have been the time when Milton wrote his mildly erotic Elegia septima, though it is possible that the poem was written as late as 1630. On returning to Cambridge, probably in the autumn of 1627, Milton was assigned to a new tutor, Nathaniel Tovey. When Milton's younger brother Christopher [see Milton, Sir Christopher] was admitted to Christ's College in February 1631, he too was assigned to Tovey, which may imply that Milton had established a better relationship with Tovey than he had managed with Chappell.

Milton's final year as an undergraduate began badly when his friend Alexander Gil the younger was imprisoned for toasting the assassin of Buckingham, but Milton continued to study and occasionally to compose verse. He supplicated for his BA early in 1629 and later signed (apparently without scruple) the three articles of religion in the university subscription book. The spring of 1629 is the most likely date of composition for Milton's sonnet 'O nightingale' (later Sonnet 1), his 'Song. On May Morning', and his sensuous Latin poem In adventum veris ('On the coming of spring'), later Elegia quinta.

The Cambridge MA is now taken without residence, but such was not the case in the seventeenth century, and Milton returned to Cambridge in October 1629. It may have been during this term that he wrote five Italian sonnets (later sonnets 2–6) and a stanza di canzone. The native-speaker fluency of these youthful love poems is an earnest of the formidable linguistic ability that was later to be associated with Milton. One of the sonnets is addressed to Diodati; another seems furtively to address a lady called Emilia, who may have been a member of the Italian protestant community in London or a product of Milton's enamoured imagination. Early on Christmas day 1629 Milton completed 'On the Morning of Christ's Nativity'; shortly thereafter he sent a copy of the poem to Diodati, describing it in his accompanying Latin verse letter (later Elegia sexta) as a birthday gift to Christ, composed by the first light of dawn. In one of the introductory stanzas to the poem, Milton describes his 'hymn' as a 'humble ode', so aligning his Christian hymn with the pagan traditions of the ode; the poem is now known as the 'Nativity Ode'. It was Milton's first English poem on a religious theme, and he later indicated its importance in his spiritual and poetic development by placing it first in his 1645 and 1673 Poems. The 'Nativity Ode' inaugurated a triptych of poems based on the church calendar: Milton's unfinished poem in the metaphysical style, 'The Passion', was composed for Good Friday, probably in 1630, and 'Upon the Circumcision' marks new year's day, possibly in 1633.

In the autumn of 1630 the booksellers who had published the first folio of Shakespeare's plays began to make arrangements to produce a second folio, which was eventually published in 1632. For reasons that are not clear, Milton was asked (or volunteered) to contribute a commendatory poem; this was to be Milton's first published poem, and he later collected it as 'On Shakespeare' and dated it 1630. On new year's day 1631 Thomas Hobson, the octogenarian driver of the Cambridge to London coach, died in Cambridge, and university wits who had endured his reckless driving were quick to mourn his passing. Milton joined in the affectionate commemorations with two (or possibly three) poems 'On the University Carrier'; the tone of the poems is light-hearted, but the closing lines of the first poem, in which Death is personified as the bedroom attendant in an inn, constitute one of the most graceful descriptions of mortality in English poetry. A more serious memorial poem followed a few months later: Jane Savage, the marchioness of Winchester, died on 15 April 1631, and although Milton seems not to have known her, he joined in the public mourning with an 'Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester', which he wrote on 'the banks of Cam'.

Hammersmith and Horton, 1631–1638
Early in 1631 the Milton family moved to Hammersmith, which was then a hamlet in the parish of Fulham, some 6 miles west of London on the north bank of the Thames. Milton's father was certainly in residence in April 1631, when he was assessed for poor relief. Two months later, on 7 June 1631, a newly established chapel of ease was consecrated by Bishop Laud; Milton's father became a churchwarden, and, on coming down from Cambridge, Milton became a parishioner. He had sworn on supplicating for his MA to continue his studies for an additional five years; two years later (in 1639) he would have been eligible to apply for the degree of bachelor of divinity (Latin sanctae theologiae baccalaureus). This oath was merely the vestige of an earlier custom, but Milton seems to have taken it seriously, because he chose to spend the next five years in private study; he was later to claim that he was making good the deficiencies of his Cambridge education. In signing the subscription book to take his MA, Milton once again acknowledged the liturgy and doctrine of the Church of England and the supremacy of the king; he was eventually to ignore the liturgy, repudiate several key aspects of the doctrine, and applaud the execution of the king to whom he had sworn allegiance.

From time to time Milton interrupted his private studies in order to compose verse, but there is no evidence for the dates of several important works that seem to be products of the early 1630s. The Latin poem addressed to his father, Ad patrem, may be a product of this period, as may Milton's English translation of Horace's fifth ode, Ad Pyrrham. His pastoral entertainment, Arcades, was performed in the garden of Harefield, the estate of the dowager countess of Derby near Uxbridge. The poised and sprightly twin poems 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso' may date from this period, if indeed they were written at the same time, but the countryside described in 'L'Allegro' contains no features that enable it to be tied to a specific place and time. Similarly, 'At a Solemn Music' and 'On Time' are likely to have been written during this period, but cannot be dated with any precision. His sonnet 'How soon hath time' (later Sonnet 7), however, can be assigned with some confidence to December 1632, close to Milton's twenty-fourth birthday.

In 1634 Milton was asked to compose the text of a masque which was to be mounted in Ludlow in honour of the inauguration of John Egerton, earl of Bridgewater, as lord president of Wales; Ludlow is in England rather than Wales, but it is in the Welsh marches and was the seat of the court of marches, over which the earl of Bridgewaterwas to preside. The music for the masque was written by Henry Lawes, who had probably commissioned Milton to compose the text. The masque was performed at Ludlow Castle on Monday 29 September 1634. Three of the earl's children (all of whom had acted before) played the central roles, and Henry Lawes acted the part of the Attendant Spirit. The idea that Milton travelled to Ludlow and acted the part of Comus is a scholarly fantasy without foundation. In 1637 or early in 1638 Lawes published Milton's text (without any indication of its authorship) as A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle, and Milton reprinted it in his Poems of 1645. Since the late seventeenth century the masque has been known as Comus; to call the masque after the tempter is rather like referring to Paradise Lost as Satan, but the title is now firmly established. Later in the year, Alexander Gil wrote a Latin epithalamium, and sent a copy to Milton; on 4 December Milton replied, enclosing a recently composed translation of Psalm 114 into Greek verse.

On 12 May 1636 Milton's father resigned as assistant to the Company of Scriveners on the grounds of his 'removal to inhabit in the country'. This phrase (in a manuscript that is now lost) indicates the retirement of Milton's family to Horton, Buckinghamshire (later Berkshire). Milton may have used the nearby libraries at Eton College and Langley (the Kedermister Library) to support his programme of private study, but London was much less accessible than it had been in Hammersmith. It was about this time that Milton started to record titbits from his voluminous reading in a commonplace book (now in the British Library), which he continued to use until after the Restoration.

Less than a year after Milton had settled with his parents into the rural seclusion of Horton, his mother, Sara, died, on 3 April 1637. Milton and his father buried her in the aisle of the chancel of Horton church; the inscribed blue stone still bears her name. Milton seems not to have written a poem in her memory, but soon occasion arose for him to write his greatest memorial poem, one that is arguably the finest short poem in the English language. The occasion of 'Lycidas' was the death of Edward King, a fellow of Christ's College who had drowned off the coast of Anglesey on 10 August 1637. Kinghad been a younger contemporary of Milton at Christ's College, and had been awarded a fellowship by royal mandate. The myth that Milton was aggrieved because he had been robbed of the fellowship for which he was destined was invented in the eighteenth century, and is based on the groundless assumption that an academic post, with its attendant obligations of celibacy and ordination in the Church of England, would have been the highest calling to which Milton might have aspired. In fact Milton was contemptuous of Cambridge, and in any case he was ineligible for election, because the statutes of the college prohibited the election of more than one fellow from any county; Michael Honywood was, like Milton, a native of Middlesex, and so Milton could not have been elected to a fellowship as long as Honywood was in post.

The death of Ben Jonson on 16 August, six days after the death of Edward King, was marked in Oxford by a collection of memorial poems entitled Jonsonus virbius. It is possible that this volume provided a stimulus for the poets of Cambridge to assemble a rival volume in memory of King, who had lacked Jonson's great gifts as a poet, but had none the less published ten competent Latin poems. Milton was asked to contribute a poem, and in November 1637 copied a draft of 'Lycidas' into his poetical notebook (now in Trinity College, Cambridge, and so known as the Trinity manuscript). The poem was published in Justa Edouardo King naufrago ab amicis moerentibus, amoris et mneias charin('Obsequies to Edward King, drowned by shipwreck, in token of love and remembrance, by his grieving friends') late in 1638. Milton had chosen to write in English, and his poem was placed at the end of the English section of the volume, which had a separate title-page (Obsequies to the Memory of Mr Edward King). Most of the poems in the volume was written in the fashionable idiom of the metaphysical poem, often in imitation of Donne. Milton chose to ignore this contemporary enthusiasm for wittily expressed grief in favour of the traditional genre of the pastoral elegy. His poem originated in a desire to commemorate King, but in the act of composition Miltontranscended his ostensible subject and produced a meditation on human mortality that retains the power to move readers centuries after the death of King and those who mourned him.

The origins of Milton's disenchantment with the Caroline church are not clear, but the earliest unambiguous evidence would seem to be enshrined in 'Lycidas', in which the apostle Peter censures the English church. Satire directed against the church had been a part of pastoral elegy since Petrarch, and Milton took advantage of this convention to mount an attack on the greed of the clergy, whom he stigmatizes as 'blind mouths'; he does, however, furnish Peter with a bishop's mitre, because in 1637 Milton was still content with the notion that it was Peter who had inaugurated the succession of bishops.

'Lycidas' concludes with an affirmation that when grieving has finished, life must go on: 'Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new'. Milton had grieved privately for his mother and publicly for Edward King, and he then turned to his plans to travel to the woods and pastures of Italy. He sought advice from Sir Henry Wotton, who had retired from his diplomatic career to become provost of Eton, which was within a few miles of Horton. On 6 April 1638 Milton wrote to Wotton, enclosing a copy of Comus and mentioning his intention to travel to Italy in the next few weeks. Wotton's reply, which Milton printed in the edition of Comus in his 1645 Poems, contained advice about the best route and about deportment, together with an introduction to the English ambassador in Paris.

Italy, 1638–1639
In May 1638 Milton left England for a tour of the continent that was to last approximately fifteen months. He first travelled from London to Paris, where he met the ambassador of King Charles, Viscount Scudamore of Sligo. Lord Scudamorearranged for Milton to meet Hugo Grotius, the learned Dutch jurist who was living in Paris as the ambassador of Queen Kristina of Sweden. On leaving Paris, Milton travelled south to Nice, along the coast to Genoa, thence to Leghorn by ship, and then inland via Pisa to Florence, where he arrived in June 1638 for a visit of about five months. During this first visit to Florence, Milton participated in the meetings of at least two Florentine academies (the Svogliati and the Apatisti) and so became acquainted with the learned men of the city, several of whom composed tributes to Milton which he was later to print in his 1645 Poemata. Milton's attendance at the weekly meetings of the Svogliati in the new palazzo of the Gaddi family (later the Hotel Astoria) enabled him to meet the poet Antonio Malatesti, who subsequently dedicated La Tina, an erotic sonnet sequence, 'al grande poeta inghilese Giovanni Milton Londra' ('to the great English poet John Milton of London'). At these meetings Milton also met the scholar Benedetto Buonmattei, to whom Milton subsequently wrote proposing additions to his Della lingua Toscana (the suggestions were ignored) and Vincenzo Galilei, the illegitimate son of Galileo. It may have been Vincenzo who arranged for Milton to visit Galileo, either in the astronomer's house at Arcetri or in Vincenzo's house on the Costa San Giorgio, where Galileo was staying for medical treatment; Milton was later to recall the visit in Areopagitica (1644). On 6/16 September 1638 Milton read one of his own Latin poems to the academicians, who judged it to be 'molto erudita'. There is a late tradition to the effect that Milton visited Vallombrosa while staying in Florence, but there is no evidence and little likelihood that such a visit took place; Milton's allusion to the 'autumnal leaves that strew the brook / In Vallombrosa' (Paradise Lost, book 1, ll. 302–3) derives from Ariosto, not from a recollection of an excursion to the monastery at Vallombrosa.

In October 1638 Milton travelled south to Siena and thence to Rome, where he stayed for about two months. On 20/30 October he dined in the English College, where the pilgrim book records the presence of Milton and his unnamed servant as well as three other English guests. In December Milton journeyed on to Naples in the company of an unidentified traveller whom Milton later described as a hermit; he was presumably a Carmelite friar. This well-connected hermit introduced Milton to his Neapolitan host, Giovanni Battista Manso, marchese di Villa, to whom Milton later addressed Mansus, a poem that sought to demonstrate in its elegant Latin hexameters that Manso, who had been the patron of Torquato Tasso and Giambattista Marino, had once again offered hospitality to a poet. Milton had originally planned to go on from Naples to Sicily and Greece, but he decided to abandon these plans and travel slowly home; he later attributed this decision (in the Defensio secunda) to 'the sad tidings of civil war from England … For I thought it base that I should travel abroad at my ease for the cultivation of my mind while my fellow citizens at home were fighting for liberty'.

In January 1639 Milton returned to Rome, where he met (or renewed his acquaintance with) the poet Giovanni Salzilli (to whom he later addressed his Latin poem Ad Salsillam), the German scholar and Catholic convert Lukas Holste, and Cardinal Francesco Barberini. Holste, who was secretary and librarian to Cardinal Barberini, showed Milton around the Barberini Library and presented him with a copy of his recently published bilingual edition of the axioms of the later Pythagoreans; on learning that Milton was returning to Florence, Holste asked him to visit the Laurentian Library to copy parts of a Medicean codex for him. During this visit to Rome, Milton attended at least two musical events. He was present at a recital given by the singer Leonora Baroni and subsequently wrote three conventionally enraptured epigrams in her honour, Ad Leonoram Romae canentem ('To Leonora, Singing in Rome'). On 17/27 February he attended a comic opera (Rospigliosi's Chi soffre, speri) mounted by Cardinal Francesco Barberini in the vast theatre of the newly completed Palazzo Barberini; the audience of 3500 included Cardinal Mazarin. Milton later recalled that he was greeted at the door by Cardinal Barberini, who granted him a private audience the next day; Barberini was prime minister of Rome and chief adviser to his uncle Pope Urban VIII, but he was also protector of the English, and in that capacity regularly offered hospitality and assistance to travellers such as Milton.

In March 1639 Milton returned to Florence, where he tried unsuccessfully to obtain permission to copy the manuscript for Holste. He again attended the Thursday meetings of the Svogliati, reading his Latin poems on 7/17 and 14/24 March. In April Milton travelled to Bologna and Ferrara and thence to Venice, where he stayed for at least a month. He shipped home the collection of books that he had amassed in his travels, including at least one case of music books containing works by Claudio Monteverdi (who was still living in Venice), Luca Marenzio, Orazio Vecchi, and Don Carlo Gesualdo. He then proceeded from Venice to Verona and Milan, through Lombardy and the Apennine Alps to Lake Geneva and on to Geneva, where he visited the theologian Giovanni (or Jean) Diodati, uncle of his friend Charles Diodati; if he had not heard the news of Charles's death earlier, Milton may have been told in Geneva. In July he returned to England through France, and shortly thereafter published a Latin poem in memory of Diodati; the only known copy of this edition of the Epitaphium Damonis ('Epitaph for Damon'), the greatest of Milton's Latin poems, survives in the British Library.

Schoolmaster and polemicist, 1639–1642
On returning to London, Milton took lodgings at the house of a tailor called Russell in St Bride's Churchyard (near Fleet Street), where he inaugurated his career as a schoolmaster by assuming responsibility for the education of his nephews Edward and John Phillips. He soon moved to a large house in Aldersgate Street, where he was able to take on additional pupils. Milton's life in the 1640s was divided between his duties as a teacher and his avocation as a polemicist involved in the controversy about church government and initiating a debate about divorce.

In 'Lycidas', Milton's attack on the Caroline church had centred on what he saw as ecclesiastical cupidity; when he renewed his attack four years later his censure was directed towards episcopacy, the system whereby churches are governed by bishops. Episcopacy had been enshrined in the Elizabethan settlement, but throughout the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, vigorous opposition had been voiced by reformers who felt that episcopacy was a vestige of Roman Catholicism and an impediment to the realization of a full reformation. Under Elizabeth the crown had assumed the title of ‘supreme governor’ of the English church, and so the monarch stood at the head of the episcopate. The crown became associated with the episcopal cause, and so it seems likely that Milton's anti-monarchical sentiments of the 1650s had their origins in his anti-episcopal stance of the early 1640s. The debate about episcopacy had rumbled on for decades, but in 1637 had erupted because of the indictment of three prominent puritans (Henry Burton, John Bastwick, and William Prynne) for publishing tracts which attacked episcopacy; the court of Star Chambersentenced the three defendants to torture and mutilation on the scaffold and subsequent incarceration. By 1641 the combatants in the debate had begun to write polemical treatises: Joseph Hall, bishop of Norwich, had published a defence of episcopacy called An Humble Remonstrance to the High Court of Parliament, and a few months later, in March 1641, a group of puritan ministers known collectively by their initials as Smectymnuus (Stephen Marshall, Edward Calamy, Milton's former tutor Thomas Young, Matthew Newcomen, and William Spurstow), responded to Hall with An Answer to a Book Entitled ‘An Humble Remonstrance’. In April Hall hit back with A Defence of the Humble Remonstrance, to which Smectymnuus replied in June with A Vindication of the Answer of the Humble Remonstrance; the following month Hallresponded yet again with his Short Answer to the Tedious Vindication of Smectymnuus.

At this point Milton entered the lists with the first of his five anti-prelatical pamphlets, Of reformation touching church discipline in England and the causes that hitherto have hindered it, which was published between 12 and 31 May 1641. This anonymous tract outlines the pernicious effects of episcopacy, but sets aside the theoretical arguments about church government in favour of fulminations against the episcopate which culminate in a call for the execution of bishops and a prophecy that they will spend eternity being tortured in hell. In the same month that Milton's first tract was published, the patristic scholar James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh, published The Judgement of Dr Rainolds Touching the Original of Episcopacy, in which he sought to confirm the views of the Elizabethan churchman John Rainolds by recourse to patristic authority. Milton responded with Of prelatical episcopacy, and whether it may be deduced from the apostolical times by virtue of those testimonies which are alleged to that purpose in some late treatises, one whereof goes under the name of James, archbishop of Armagh. In this short tract Milton contended that to support episcopacy by resort to the church fathers was tantamount to denying the sufficiency of scripture, and also lent hostages to fortune in providing arguments that could be used to defend Roman Catholicism; throughout the tract Milton maintains a civil tone with his learned opponent, but he none the less declares Ussher's scholarship to be wanting in several important particulars.

Milton's third anti-prelatical tract was a response to Hall's Defence of the Humble Remonstrance, which had been published in April 1641; Milton replied in July with Animadversions upon the Remonstrant's Defence Against Smectymnuus. The qualified deference that Milton had shown to Archbishop Ussher is nowhere in evidence; instead Milton mounts an excoriating personal attack on Bishop Hall. He returns to the attack on the greed of the clergy first articulated in 'Lycidas'; the reticence of pastoral elegy has given way to the savagery of seventeenth-century polemic, and Milton pours vitriol on those who would use the church to amass personal fortunes.

In 1641 episcopalian apologists assembled a tract (possibly edited by Archbishop Ussher) entitled Certain brief treatises written by learned men concerning the ancient and modern government of the church. At the end of January 1642 Milton published his reply, The Reason of Church Government Urged Against Prelaty; the title-page (which is dated 1641) reveals the identity of this tireless polemicist as 'Mr John Milton'. The decision to shed the cloak of anonymity is reflected in the body of the tract by the emergence of a newly radical Milton who is willing to 'divulge unusual things of myself' in an autobiographical digression. Whereas in Of Prelatical Episcopacy and AnimadversionsMilton had argued as a presbyterian within the national church of England, in The Reason of Church Government he moves away from state presbyterianism towards independent congregationalism, which had taken root in the puritan colonies of America and had been re-exported to England as radical tolerationism: Milton had not become a sectarian, but he now differed from the presbyterians in arguing for a measure of toleration, so adumbrating the explicitly tolerationist position that he was to take up in his later years.

Milton's fifth and final anti-prelatical tract, published in April 1642, is entitled An apology against a pamphlet called ‘A modest confutation of a scandalous and scurrilous libel entitled Animadversions’. The anonymous Modest Confutation to which Milton replies had been published the previous month; its authorship is uncertain, but it may be the joint work of Joseph Hall and his son Robert. The attack that Milton had directed against Bishop Hall in Animadversions is heartily reciprocated in the Modest Confutation, which accuses Milton of personal immorality. Milton was always sensitive to personal attacks, and although this sensitivity did not inhibit him in the return of fire in these polemical skirmishes, he always insisted on defending his personal purity: on this occasion he testily insisted that he had never visited brothels as an undergraduate, but that he had observed the irresponsible behaviour of fellow undergraduates who were in due course to rise to senior positions in the church while never managing to shed their adolescent irresponsibility. In the course of the five years between mid-1637 and mid-1642 Milton had moved from being a constructively critical member of the national church to taking up the cause of ecclesiastical reform, and eventually becoming an impassioned opponent of ecclesiastical abuses: he had become an Independent.

Marriage and prose tracts, 1642–1648
In June 1642 Milton embarked on a journey to Forest Hill, in Oxfordshire, with a view to collecting an interest payment of £12 from Richard Powell, an improvident landowner and magistrate to whom Milton's father had lent £300 in 1627. Edward Phillips was later to record that 'after a month's stay, home he returns a married man, that went out a bachelor, his wife being Mary the eldest daughter of Mr Richard Powell'. After the wedding Milton took his seventeen-year-old bride home to his house on Aldersgate Street. A few weeks later Mary returned to her parental home. The initial extension of what was intended as a short separation may have been occasioned by the outbreak of civil war on 22 August, when King Charles raised his standard at Nottingham, but it eventually became clear that the newly wedded couple were estranged.

The reasons for the almost instantaneous collapse of Milton's marriage are not known, but the seriousness of the rift is attested by the fact that Milton redirected his scholarly energies from episcopacy to divorce. In seventeenth-century England a divorce that permitted remarriage could be granted only by parliament; ordinary citizens without access to parliament had to turn to the ecclesiastical courts, which had the power only to grant a form of judicial separation called divorce (a mensa et thoro'from table and bed'). For centuries canon law had stipulated six grounds for divorce: sexual offences (adultery, sodomy, and bestiality), impotence, physical cruelty, infidelity (that is, apostasy), entry into holy orders, and consanguinity; Milton's wife may have deserted him, but in England desertion did not constitute grounds for divorce until 1937. On 1 August 1643 Milton published The doctrine and discipline of divorce, restored to the good of both sexes from the bondage of canon law and other mistakes to Christian freedom, in which he argued that the traditional grounds for divorce were insufficient, and that a man should be able to divorce his wife if the marriage had become spiritually and emotionally barren. Milton does not argue for equal rights for the woman in marriage, but his views none the less anticipate in several respects the position that English law reached in 1969, when it was decreed that the irretrievable breakdown of a marriage constituted grounds for divorce.

On 2 February 1644 Milton published a heavily revised second edition of Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce which he addressed to the English parliament and the Westminster assembly; the reason for the twofold audience was that if the assembly approved of Milton's suggestions, parliament would probably have enshrined new divorce rules in law.

Milton's practical experience of a domestic classroom had led him to reflect on the education appropriate to young members of the governing class. The educational reformer Samuel Hartlib asked Milton to set out his views on the education of children. Milton replied with Of Education, a public letter to Hartlib which was published on 5 June 1644. The pamphlet sets out the daunting programme of a Miltonic education, which encompasses ancient languages (Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac) and a huge range of academic and practical subjects; the only modern language mentioned is Italian, which Milton magisterially claims can be 'easily learned at any odd hour'. The boys in this academy would be prepared to govern a nation, but also to fight for it and oversee its agriculture. To teach in such an academy would not, Milton concedes, be a task for anyone 'that counts himself a teacher, but will require sinews almost equal to those which Homer gave Ulysses'. Milton's educational aspirations were heroic, but his practical efforts as a teacher failed to produce highly educated warrior princes: the Miltonic education of his two nephews equipped them for only the modest profession of hack writing.

On 6 August 1644 Milton published his second divorce tract, again addressed to parliament; this tract is a translation and condensation of chapters 15 to 47 of the second book of De regno Christi ('On the kingdom of Christ') by Martin Butzer (or Bucer), which Milton called The Judgement of Martin Bucer Concerning Divorce. A week later, on 13 August, Herbert Palmer condemned Milton's divorce tracts in a sermon to parliament, and eleven days later parliament was asked by the Company of Stationersto control unlicensed and unregistered books, including Milton's Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce.

This attempt to stifle Milton's tract may have been the spark that ignited his wrath against those who would censor books before publication. Areopagitica was Milton'sbelated response to the licensing order of June 1643, which stipulated that all books had to be examined by a censor prior to publication. His tract, published on 23 November 1644, takes the form of an oration addressed to parliament, which Milton accused of reviving the oppressive measures of a Star Chamber decree of July 1637. Milton's Greek title proposes an analogy between the English parliament and the ancient council of Athens which met on the Areopagus (the ‘Hill of Ares’ north-west of the Acropolis), and also recalls the Areopagiticus, an oration by the ancient orator Isocrates. In the short term Milton was unsuccessful, because parliament ignored his plea; in subsequent centuries, however, Areopagitica came to be valued as the most eloquent defence in English of the right to publish without prior censorship. It has also been invoked as a defence of free speech, but in fact the limits of Miltonic toleration were strictly circumscribed, and include a denial of the rights of Roman Catholics to publish works in defence of their religion.

On 4 March 1645 Milton published his third and fourth divorce tracts, Tetrachordon and Colasterion. Both titles are taken from ancient Greek. Tetrachordon is an adjective meaning ‘four-stringed’, and the neuter suffix links it to the word for musical instrument; Milton is straining to suggest that in the tract he is harmonizing the four main biblical treatments of marriage and divorce. Colasterion is a noun which refers to a place or instrument of torture; Edward Phillips translated the term as 'rod of correction', which may imply that he understood his uncle to be alluding to the beating that he had inflicted on his opponent, who in this instance was the anonymous author of An Answer to a Book Entitled ‘The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce’, which had been published on 19 November 1644. Milton's reputation as an advocate of divorce had incurred the obloquy of the ecclesiastical establishment, but at least one person seems to have invoked Milton to justify an otherwise unsanctioned divorce: Mrs Attaway, the lacewoman turned radical preacher, spoke approvingly of Milton's tract, and deserted her ungodly husband for William Jenny, the godly husband of another woman. It was about this time that news reached the Powell family to the effect that Milton was planning to divorce Mary and marry the daughter of one Dr Davies. Phillips reports that this prospect 'caused them to set all engines on work to restore the late married woman' (Masson, 3.437); a reconciliation was effected, probably in mid-1645, and when Milton moved into a large house in Barbican in the autumn of 1645, he was joined by Mary. Their daughter Anne was born on 7 July 1646; Milton entered the details on the flyleaf of his family Bible (now in the British Library), where he had recently begun to record his family's births and deaths.

Milton's father died in March 1647, and that autumn Milton moved with his young family to a smaller house in High Holborn, backing onto Lincoln's Inn Fields. In the following year, on 25 October, his daughter Mary was born. The move to a smaller house may reflect a diminution of (or even a conclusion to) Milton's career as a teacher. In this period of relative calm between the end of teaching and the onset of his career as a public servant, Milton turned to private study and writing. It may have been in 1648 that he wrote his Brief History of Moscovia, published posthumously in 1683. At the same time it seems likely that Milton was gathering materials for his History of Britain, the first four books of which he drafted, according to his own account, in the six weeks between the execution of the king on 30 January 1649 and his own appointment as Latin secretary on 13 March.

Poetry, 1641–1648
The poems that Milton wrote in the 1640s were all short occasional pieces, and for the most part consisted of sonnets. After the battle of Edgehill on 23 October 1642, the army of Charles I advanced towards London, causing widespread panic in the capital. Milton's 'Captain or Colonel' (later Sonnet 8), which is entitled 'When the assault was intended to the City' in the Trinity manuscript, may have been occasioned by the prospect of the fall of London. The next poem in the Trinity manuscript is 'Lady, that in the prime of earliest youth' (later Sonnet 9), which uses the parable of the wise and foolish virgins to praise an unidentified lady. This poem may have been followed by 'To the Lady Margaret Ley' (later Sonnet 10). Lady Margaret was the daughter of James Ley, the first earl of Marlborough, and the second wife of Captain John Hobson, who had fought on the side of parliament; the Hobsons lived near Milton on Aldersgate Street, and Milton was a regular visitor to their home during the years when he was separated from Mary.

In 1645 Milton decided to collect his youthful poems. The edition was published as Poems of Mr John Milton, both English and Latin; the edition is dated 1645, but may have been published on 2 January 1646, which is the date that George Thomason inscribed on his copy, which is now in the British Library. The English section was a miscellany consisting of early poems and translations, Milton's first ten sonnets (including the Italian sonnets), and Comus, which Milton had revised since its last publication. The Latin section (which included a few Greek poems) had a separate title-page, Joannis Miltoni Londoniensis poemata. Quorum pleraque intra annum aetatis vigesimum conscripsit('Poems by John Milton of London, most of which were Written before he was Twenty'); this section was paginated separately, and was divided into a book of poems in elegiac couplets (Elegiarum liber) and a collection of poems in various metres (Sylvarum liber). The publisher, Humphrey Moseley, commissioned a portrait of Miltonfrom the engraver William Marshall. The portrait is unflattering, and when Milton was shown it, he sought a cruel revenge by composing a few lines of Greek verse, which the hapless (and Greekless) Marshall engraved beneath the portrait; the verses invite the reader to laugh at the portrait, which Milton says is not a picture of him but of the incompetence of the engraver. It seems possible that the cruel humour of the God of Paradise Lost has its origins in the personality of his creator.

Milton felt that his Tetrachordon had been ignored, and lamented this injustice in 'A book was writ of late called Tetrachordon' (later Sonnet 11), the precise date of which is unknown: it seems to have been written too late for inclusion in the 1645 Poems, and its position in the Trinity manuscript may imply a date of composition in 1647. This sense of injured merit is extended to all four of Milton's divorce tracts in 'On the Detraction which Followed upon my Writing Certain Treatises' (later Sonnet 12); again the date of composition is uncertain, but the winter of 1645–6 is not unlikely, and so the numbering of sonnets 11 and 12 is normally reversed in modern editions. The sonnet in praise of the music of Henry Lawes ('To Mr Henry Lawes, on his Airs', later Sonnet 13) can be dated more precisely, because the first of the three drafts in the Trinity manuscript is dated 9 February '1645' (that is, 1646). In 1646 or early 1647 Miltonwrote a twenty-line poem 'On the new forcers of conscience under the Long Parliament', which concludes with the etymological epigram 'new Presbyter is but old Priest writ large'.

On 16 December 1646 Katharine Thomason, the wife of Milton's friend George Thomason, was buried in the south aisle of St Dunstan-in-the-West; shortly thereafter Milton wrote a sonnet in her memory (later Sonnet 14). A few weeks later, on 23 January 1647, he returned to Latin poetry with an ode to John Rouse, Bodley's librarian, to accompany a presentation copy of his 1645 Poems intended to replace a copy that had gone astray. In April 1648, on the eve of the second civil war, Milton translated psalms 80–88 from the Hebrew. His next poem is a direct reaction to one event in that war: General Lord Fairfax besieged Colchester on 14 June, and the town fell on 27 August; during the siege Milton wrote a sonnet in praise of Fairfax (later Sonnet 15). By the end of the year the Rump Parliament had decided to indict the king, which set England on a course that was to carry Milton into a public role as a writer and translator in the service of the English republic.

Public service and the three defences, 1649–1655
Between 15 and 29 January 1649, during the trial of Charles I, Milton wrote his Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, which argued on its title-page that 'it is lawful … for any who have the power, to call to account a Tyrant or wicked King and after due conviction, to depose, and put him to death'. Charles was executed on 30 January 1649, and a fortnight later, on 13 February, Milton's tract was published. At noon on 13 March the council of state decided to invite Milton to be secretary for foreign tongues. He was appointed two days later, on Thursday 15 March, at an annual salary of £288 13s. 6½d. Before he could take up his post on the following Tuesday, parliament abolished the House of Lords (17 March) and the monarchy (19 March), so Milton entered the service of a nascent republic. The post included accommodation in Whitehall, but as an interim measure Milton lodged next to the Bull-head tavern in Charing Cross, opening on to Spring Garden. In November Milton moved with his household into an apartment formerly occupied by Sir John Hippesley at the Scotland Yard end of Whitehall; when the art collection of Charles I was put on sale in nearby Somerset House, Milton was given a warrant (dated 18 June 1650) to choose some hangings from the royal collection 'for the furnishing of his lodging in Whitehall'.

In the first instance Milton's duties in the service of the council of state consisted for the most part in translating international correspondence into the Latin of diplomacy; this was a task which Milton discharged throughout his period as a civil servant, but he quickly assumed more important tasks alongside these routine duties. On 28 March the council ordered:

that Mr. Milton be appointed to make some observations upon the complication of interests which is now amongst the several designers against the peace of the Commonwealth; And that it be ready to be printed with the Papers out of Ireland which the House hath ordered to be printed.

Masson, 4.87
The Articles of Peace were published on 16 May, and Milton's Observations were printed as an appendix. From Milton's English perspective the native Irish were barbarians who massacred civilized English settlers and soldiers; the anachronistic condemnation of Milton's hostile attitude does not facilitate historical understanding, but it is undeniably the case that the consequences of such hostility were immediately felt in the massacres at Drogheda and Wexford, and still reverberate in Anglo-Irish politics.

On 9 February 1649, ten days after the execution of King Charles, Eikōn Basilikē had been published; the Greek title means ‘image of the king’. This book, which purported to have been written by the king (and was in fact written by his chaplain John Gauden), achieved an instant popularity, and within a year had been published in some fifty editions in various languages. The council of state was concerned that sympathy for the king could subvert the Commonwealth, and so commissioned an official reply. Initially John Selden had been asked to respond, but when he declined the council turned to Milton. In October Milton published his reply, which he entitled Eikonoklastēs; the literal meaning of the Greek title is ‘image-breaker’, but the term was meant to evoke the surname adopted by Greek emperors 'who in their zeal to the command of God, after long tradition of idolatry in the church, took courage and broke all superstitious images to pieces'. The regicide had alarmed continental Europe, and one of the first scholarly defences of Charles I, the Defensio regia pro Carolo I ('The royal defence of Charles I') written by the learned French protestant Claude de Saumaise (Claudius Salmasius), reached England in May 1649. On 8 January 1650 the council of state ordered Milton to prepare a reply to this damaging book, which threatened to delay the resumption of normal trade relations with the continent. Milton's reply, Joannis Miltonii Angli defensio pro populo Anglicano contra Claudii Anonymi, aliàs Salmasii, defensionem regiam ('The defence of John Milton, Englishman, on behalf of the people of England against the royal defence of Claudius the Anonymous, otherwise Salmasius') was not published until 24 February 1651; it is now known by the non-Miltonic title Defensio prima or First Defence. In the text Milton excuses his delay on grounds both of a lack of time to write and of insufficient health for the labour of writing; even now, he explains in his preface, his health is so poor and precarious that he has to take a break virtually every hour. Among the purchasers of this volume was the second earl of Bridgewater, who as a child had acted the part of the Elder Brother in Milton's Comus; he inscribed his copy (which is now in the Huntington Library) with the words (in Latin) 'this book is most deserving of burning, its author of the gallows'. This judgement, which was typical of English royalist reactions, was echoed in the chancellaries of Europe, and it was to the educated citizens of Europe (especially those of the United Provinces) that Milton addressed his defence of the regicide.

The first response to Milton's tract, Pro rege et populo Anglicano apologia, contra Johannis Polypragmatici (alias Miltoni Angli) defensionem destructivam regis et populi Anglicani ('An apology for the king and people of England against the defence, destructive of the king and people of England, by John the Multifarious, alias Milton the Englishman') was a plodding refutation in inept Latin (and subsequently in competent Dutch) published anonymously in Antwerp; it was popularly attributed to John Bramhall, but actually written by John Rowland. Milton decided, possibly for reasons of health, not to respond to this tract; the Responsio was instead written by his nephew John Phillips.

Milton had realized before Mary's return in 1645 that he was losing the sight in his left eye, and by 1648 the eye had ceased to function. Early in 1652 his right eye collapsed, and Milton became permanently blind; he never saw his son, John, who was born on 16 March 1651. In the following year, early in May 1652, Mary Milton died shortly after giving birth to their daughter Deborah, and Milton was left, alone and blind, to care for four young children; six weeks later, his only son, John, died. Later that year Milton was evicted from his Whitehall apartment, and on 17 December he moved with his three surviving children into a house in Petty France opening on to St James's Park; he stayed in this house until the Restoration.

In August 1652 an anonymous tract called Regii sanguinis clamor ad coelum adversus parricidas Anglicanos ('A cry to heaven of the king's blood against the English parricides') was published in The Hague. The Clamor contains a brutal personal attack on Milton in its opening pages, and concludes with a 245-line poem that renews the attack. The author of this work was almost certainly the Anglican divine Peter Du Moulin, who sent it to Salmasius in order that it could be published in the Netherlands; Salmasius passed the manuscript to Alexander More, a minister of the Reformed church. More (Latin Morus) contributed a preface to Du Moulin's treatise, and sent it to Adriaan Vlacq, who published it in The Hague. Milton mistakenly assumed that Morewas the author of the treatise, and although he was apprised of his error by John Durieand Samuel Hartlib, he stood by his mistake and flatly refused to be dissuaded. In May 1654 Milton replied to the Clamor with Joannis Miltonii Angli pro populo Anglicano defensio secunda, contra infamem libellum anonymum cui titulus ‘Regii sanguinis clamor ad coelum adversus parricidas Anglicanos’ ('The second defence of John Milton, Englishman, on behalf of the English people, against an infamous anonymous libel entitled A cry to heaven of the king's blood against the English parricides'). This tract, which is usually known as the Defensio secunda or the Second Defence, is for two important reasons less republican than its predecessor: first, Cromwell had assumed the quasi-regal title lord protector in December 1653, and so Milton praises him in terms that befit a monarch; second, the need to restore relations with Sweden leads Milton to formulate a paean of praise for Queen Kristina.

The Clamor had alleged that Milton had been expelled from Cambridge and had fled in shame to Italy. Milton decided to combat this calumny by defending himself and attacking More. Milton's self-defence is a long account of his youth in which he presents himself as the epitome of moral probity in Cambridge and as a courageous protestant champion in Italy. His attack on More centres on sexual indiscretions, particularly More's seduction of a servant in the household of Salmasius. Milton seizes on this violation of Christian morality and of the hospitality of his host to pummel More, constantly playing on More's name in Latin and Greek (in which it can mean ‘mulberry tree’ and ‘fool’), and proposing an analogy between an immoral sexual act and an immoral book; in this unnatural coupling of minister and servant, Miltonalleges, both sinners became pregnant: the servant gave birth to a bastard child and the minister of the gospel gave birth to an evil book, the Clamor.

In October 1654 the deeply wounded Alexander More hit back at Milton with Alexandri Mori ecclesiasticae et sacrarum litterarum professoris fides publica, contra calumnias Ioannis Miltoni ('The public faith of Alexander More, minister and professor of sacred literature, against the misrepresentations of John Milton'); in the following spring he published a Supplementum which consists for the most part of additional evidence. These two tracts are largely concerned with personal morality (Milton's is attacked, More's defended) and with Milton's doggedly mistaken insistence that More was the author of the Clamor. Milton replied in August 1655 with his third and final defence, Joannis Miltonii Angli pro se defensio contra Alexander Morum, ecclesiasten, libelli famosi, cui titulus, ‘Regii sanguinis clamor’ … authorem recte dictum ('The defence of himself of John Milton, Englishman, against the minister Alexander More, who is rightly said to be the author of a famous libel entitled Cry of the royal blood'), in which Milton defends his own morality, attacks More's, and defends his indefensible attribution of the Clamor to More.

Poetry, 1652–1659
Milton's public voice may have echoed around Europe during the 1650s, but most of the poems that he was writing remained unpublished until 1673. In August 1653 Milton had returned to the Psalms, producing verse translations of psalms 1–8. His other poetical works of the 1650s were all sonnets. The sonnet had hitherto been a form used primarily to express the love of a man for a woman or (in the case of John Donne) for God. Milton chose instead to use the sonnet as a vehicle for principled statements on public affairs. The earliest sonnet from this period is 'To the Lord General Cromwell'(later Sonnet 16), which Milton dated 'May 1652'. Two months later, on 3 July, he composed a sonnet (later Sonnet 17) to Sir Henry Vane the younger and sent it to him. The next five sonnets seem to have been composed in 1655. The powerful 'On the late massacre in Piedmont' (later Sonnet 18), which articulates Milton's horror at the barbarous massacre of some 1700 Vaudois in April 1655, was probably composed two months later, in the last week of June. The date of 'On his Blindness' ( Sonnet 19), a title first used in 1752, is unknown; several strands of evidence point to the second half of 1655, but it could have been written as early as 1651, when Milton was enduring the final stages of encroaching blindness. The sonnet 'Lawrence of virtuous father' (laterSonnet 20) was probably composed late in 1655, as were the two sonnets addressed to Cyriack Skinner (later sonnets 21 and 22).

On 12 November 1656 Milton married Katherine Woodcock (bap. 1628, d. 1658) and in the following October Katherine gave birth to a daughter, who was named after her mother. Four months later Katherine died, and a month later their infant daughter was buried beside her. If, as seems likely but not certain, Milton's wife Katherine is the subject of 'Methought I Saw my Late Espoused Saint' (later Sonnet 23), Milton must have composed the poem in the wake of her death on 3 February 1658. Shortly thereafter he began to dictate Paradise Lost, though he regularly interrupted his work on the epic to attend to ecclesiastical and political issues in a final flurry of political tracts, the last of which appeared on the eve of the Restoration.

Prose, 1659–1660
One of the debates that had persisted throughout the Commonwealth and protectorate republic concerned Erastianism. In 1659 Thomas Erastus's Explicatio gravissimae quaestionis (1589) appeared in English translation as The Nullity of Church Censures, so giving a wide audience to Erastus's view that in a state with one religion, the jurisdiction of the state should extend to ecclesiastical as well as civil matters. Miltonwas resolutely opposed to Erastianism, and in February 1659 published A treatise of civil power in ecclesiastical causes, showing that it is not lawful for any power on earth to compel in matters of religion. Once again the tract is addressed to parliament, this time to the parliament of Richard Cromwell, which had been convened on 27 January. Milton'sshort book is a polemic directed 'against Erastus and state-tyranny over the church'.

The argument about Erastian principles was closely related to the argument about tithes, which were compulsory ecclesiastical taxes levied by local churches. Radical Independents opposed tithes on theological grounds (they were said to have emerged from the law of the Old Testament rather than the new dispensation heralded by Jesus), but also because tithes were used to support either the state church from which they wished to dissociate themselves or the secular impropriators into whose families had passed the rectorial tithes that had formerly gone to the monasteries. Milton set out his position on tithes in Considerations touching the likeliest means to remove hirelings out of the church, wherein is also discoursed of tithes, church-fees, church revenues, and whether any maintenance of ministers can be settled by law, which was published in August 1659. This tract is again addressed to parliament, but to a different parliament: Richard Cromwell had abdicated on 25 May, and the Rump Parliament had re-established the Commonwealth. In this tract Milton praises the Rump as 'the best patrons of religious and civil liberty that ever these islands brought forth', and asks them to deliver England 'from the oppressions of a simonious decimating clergy'. The phrase recalls Milton's denunciation of the 'blind mouths' of the greedy clergy in 'Lycidas'.

On 13 October 1659 General John Lambert dissolved the Rump Parliament, and on 29 October Milton expressed his dismay about this coup d'état in A Letter to a Friend, Concerning the Ruptures of the Commonwealth. The identity of the friend is not known, but it is clearly a senior political figure, perhaps the dying John Bradshaw, who may have been related to Milton and who bequeathed £10 to Milton when he died a few weeks later. In this letter, first published by John Toland in 1698, Milton explains to his influential friend that he deplores the 'backsliding' action of the army in deposing the parliament that they had recently restored, and waxes indignant that a state army could 'subdue the supreme power that set them up'. In Milton's view, the civil power, be it parliament or council of state, must always be the supreme power.

In the first fortnight of November 1659 Milton dictated Proposals of certain expedients for the preventing of a civil war now feared, and the settling of a firm government, a short tract not published until 1938; the surviving text seems to be a draft or a briefing document rather than a completed work. The tone of the pamphlet is much less combative than that of A Letter to a Friend; parliament is defended, but the army is not attacked. Miltonproposes that England be governed by a 'Grand or Supreme Council' in which members 'sit indissolubly' for the rest of their lives; he rejects the term ‘parliament’ for this body on the grounds that it is a 'Norman or French word, a monument of our ancient servitude'.

From 18 to 21 February 1660, when the Commonwealth was on the verge of collapse, Milton dictated a passionate pamphlet entitled The ready and easy way to establishing a free commonwealth, and the excellence thereof compared with the inconveniences and dangers of re-admitting kingship in this nation, which was published before the end of the month. In the face of a Restoration that looked increasingly inevitable, Miltonchose defiantly to set the bondage of monarchy against the freedom of a Christian commonwealth ruled by a grand council. This council would be both permanent and self-perpetuating; Milton was not an instinctive democrat, and did not think that popular elections were an appropriate mechanism for filling vacancies in the council.

Early in March Milton dictated The present means and brief delineation of a free commonwealth, easy to be put in practice, and without delay, the manuscript of which has disappeared; when John Toland published it in 1698 he added the words In a Letter to General Monck, a reasonable inference from the content of what seems to be the draft of a letter. The formal title, more likely to be Milton's than Toland's, implies that Miltonhad intended to write a pamphlet in the form of an open letter rather than a private letter to George Monck. The letter summarizes the proposals of The Ready and Easy Way, but with two important differences: the authority of the grand council would be limited so that it would not have the 'power to endanger our liberty', and the establishment of the council should be implemented even if there were opposition, if necessary by military force.

Milton soon set to work on the second edition of The Ready and Easy Way, revised at the end of March to accommodate the headlong rush of political change in the last days of the English republic; the tract was published in the first week of April, a month before the restoration of Charles II was proclaimed on 8 May. Milton's eloquent defence of the nobility of republican values and his horrific vision of the degeneracy and servitude that would follow in the wake of a restored monarchy make this pamphlet England's greatest monument to a lost political cause. The government that he proposes is not a direct democracy: Milton opposes 'committing all to the noise and shouting of a rude multitude', a phrase that anticipates the contempt of the Jesus of Paradise Regained for the 'miscellaneous rabble'. Instead he envisages an aristocracy of godly men, an ideal that recalls the assumption in Comus and Of Education that rulers should be an aristocracy of virtue. This argument leads Milton to the conclusion that the enlightened minority should be able to impose liberty on the ignorant majority, if necessary by force.

On 25 March Matthew Griffith, a former chaplain of Charles I, preached a royalist sermon which he published at the beginning of April as The Fear of God and the King. Milton replied, probably in the second week of April, with Brief Notes upon a Late Sermon—his last publication before the Restoration cut off his access to the medium of print. Milton expresses his satisfaction that the council of state had been quick to incarcerate Griffith, and goes on to denounce him for advocating episcopacy and for dedicating the sermon to Monck. Milton concludes that if England is about to submit to the thraldom of monarchy, it should at least choose its own monarch: Milton thought that Monckwould be a better choice than Charles Stuart. Milton's last republican tract thus advocated the second-best choice of an elected monarch. Milton was not a constitutional theorist, but it is in these tracts written in the final years of the interregnum that he articulates a shifting compromise in which he adapts the republican values that he had celebrated for more than a decade to an unstable and uncertain political situation.

One of Milton's private projects during his years as a servant of the Commonwealth and protectorate was the composition of a systematic theology. This ordonnance began as a compilation of theological writings in the 1640s, and was successively described as a 'System of Divinity', a 'Body of Divinity', and 'Idea Theologiae'. The preparation of this treatise was broken off by the Restoration; it survives as a working document, frozen in time by the cataclysm of the Restoration. How far the raw materials of the treatise have been assimilated into Milton's own thinking is unclear, and the arrangement of some chapters may not reflect Milton's final judgement. There was an abortive attempt to publish the treatise in the Netherlands shortly after Milton's death, but the manuscript was impounded by the English government, together with a collection of Milton's state papers, and was locked in a cupboard in Whitehall and forgotten until rediscovered in November 1823. By that time (or possibly at that time) the manuscript had acquired the Augustinian title De doctrina Christiana, and it was published in Latin and in English translation in 1825.

Milton's theology evolved throughout his adult life, and De doctrina and Paradise Lostrepresent his thinking in the 1650s and 1660s. Many of his theological ideas would have been regarded as unsound or even heretical by his contemporaries. He rejected the doctrine of the Trinity in favour of a modified Arianism, insisted on the materiality of angels and denied that the world had been created out of nothing; his understanding of divine grace and of soteriology aligned him with the Arminians rather than the Calvinists, and so the Adam and Eve of Paradise Lost exercise free choice.

The Restoration years, 1660–1674
The restoration of Charles II was proclaimed on 8 May 1660, and Milton went into hiding at the house of an unidentified friend in Bartholomew Close (West Smithfield). On 16 June an order for Milton's arrest was issued, and on 13 August a proclamation ordering books by Milton to be called in for burning was published; on 27 August copies of his books were duly burnt by the public executioner at the Old Bailey. Milton's life hung in the balance until 29 August, when the Act of Free and General Pardon, Indemnity and Oblivion was given the royal assent; Milton was not named as an exception to the general pardon, so he escaped the death penalty, while none the less remaining liable to arrest and assassination. Milton emerged from hiding and took a house in Holborn (in the parish of St Giles-in-the-Fields), where he lived until the autumn, when he was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower. On 15 December he was ordered to be released from the Tower and to pay the cost of his imprisonment, which was set at £150. Milton had been pardoned, but no copy of the pardon has survived (even though two copies survived long enough to be entered into indexes in the Public Record Office), so the precise reason for his release is not known. One effect of the Restoration had been the collapse of the Excise Office, which took with it Milton'ssavings of £2000. He emerged from prison in financial difficulty, and promptly protested against what he saw as the excessive fee for his imprisonment. On 17 December Andrew Marvell raised the matter in parliament, which referred it to the committee of privileges; the eventual outcome is not known. On his release from prison Milton moved to a house on Jewin Street, where he lived until about 1669.

On 24 February 1663 Milton married for the third time. He was fifty-four and his red-haired bride, Elizabeth Minshull (1638–1727), was twenty-four; she outlived her husband by more than half a century. By this stage Milton seems to have been estranged from his daughters: on being informed of her father's impending wedding, Mary replied (according to Milton's servant) 'that it was no news, to hear of his wedding, but, if she could hear of his death, that was something' (Masson, 4.476). The visitation of plague in 1665 was unusually virulent, and in July the Miltons moved to a cottage in Chalfont St Giles, a Quaker village in Buckinghamshire. The cottage belonged to Anne Fleetwood, daughter of the regicide George Fleetwood, and had been rented on Milton's behalf by the Quaker Thomas Ellwood; the cottage is the only residence of Milton still standing, and is now a museum. Milton returned to London when the plague had abated, probably in February 1666. On 2 September 1666 the conflagration later known as the great fire of London began to spread through the city, and three days later two-thirds of London had been consumed. Milton's home in Jewin Street was just north of the city wall, but in the event the fire was successfully contained on its northern flank by the wall and the ditch. Milton's house was safe, but most of his London had disappeared, including his childhood home on Bread Street, his school, and St Paul's Cathedral. In 1670 Milton lodged for a time in Duck Lane, Little Britain. The reason for this temporary accommodation is not known, but it may have been occasioned by the move from Jewin Street to Milton's last home, in Artillery Walk (now Bunhill Row).

Paradise Lost
The Restoration interrupted Milton's composition of Paradise Lost, which assumed its final form in the years 1658–63. The remote beginnings of his epic can be seen in four drafts of a tragedy called 'Paradise Lost' (in the third draft) or 'Adam Unparadised' (in the fourth draft) which survive in the Trinity manuscript; these drafts seem to have been written about 1640. Edward Phillips claimed that he had been shown part of Satan's first soliloquy (Paradise Lost, book 5, ll. 32–41) 'several years before the poem was begun', when Milton still intended it to be a tragedy rather than an epic. The difficulties of composing such a long and complex work were exacerbated by Milton'sdifficult personal circumstances and by his blindness. He seems to have composed during the winter months, usually at night or in the early morning; when an amanuensis arrived he would dictate the lines that he had composed (usually about forty), and then 'reduce them to half the number'. Edward Phillips would then correct the spelling and punctuation of 'ten, twenty or thirty verses at a time'. Composition of the poem was inevitably interrupted by Milton's months in hiding and in prison, and when he eventually resumed his dictation, his world had changed irrevocably; at the beginning of book 7 the narrator's voice acknowledges that:

More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchangedTo hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil days,On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues;In darkness, and with dangers compassed round,And solitude.
This is the voice of a blind poet whose life was in danger after the calamity of the Restoration. Milton had aspired in the opening invocation of the poem 'to justify the ways of God to men', and the collapse of the godly republic had certainly left God's ways in need of justification. Milton's view was that the Commonwealth had failed not because God had caused it to fail, but rather because the frailty of humankind can be successfully exploited by the forces of evil. The Satan whom Milton created in Paradise Lost is not a king in exile who conquers Eden by force, but rather a traitor who speaks the language of radical republicanism in order to advance his own interests; in this respect Paradise Lost reflects Milton's contention that the reign of the godly was betrayed from within. Despite this reflection of the time of crisis during which the poem was composed, Paradise Lost is neither a political allegory nor a roman-à-clef; it is rather an epic which aspires to achieve in English what Homer, Virgil, and Dante had achieved in their languages, and its avowed purpose is theological rather than political. He aspired in his epic, as he had many years earlier in Of Education, 'to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright'. He saw himself as a latter-day prophet chosen by God to explain the divine ways to those who would know God aright, and he hoped that Paradise Lost would 'fit audience find, though few' (book 7, line 31); the godly survivors of the republic had the requisite fitness, and it is to them that Milton addressed his poem. The godly government of the interregnum had been displaced by the profligate court of Charles II, and for those who had laboured for the good old cause, God's ways stood in need of justification.

Paradise Lost is an epic which accommodates within that genre several other genres: the account of Sin and Death is an allegory, the description of Eden is pastoral, the gardening labours of Adam and Eve are georgic and, most important of all, the fall of Adam and Eve is presented as a tragedy. Milton describes the fall in book 9, at the outset of which he declares that he 'now must change / Those notes to tragic', so signalling that he proposes to transform the crime and punishment narrative of the biblical account of the fall into a tragedy. It is this shift of genre that has necessitated the endowment of Adam and Eve with dramatic characters and with motives for their actions. The sympathetic presentation of these motives, together with the detailed account of the role of Satan in the fall of Eve, constitutes a plea in mitigation for the fall. Milton's version of the fall is thus an affirmation of the dignity of humankind, a sentiment rooted in the Renaissance rather than the Reformation and one which, on a political level, explains to God the human failings that led to the fall of the godly republic. In this respect, Milton was attempting to justify the ways of men to God.

The focus of Paradise Lost is the fall of Adam and Eve, but the action is also played out on a cosmic stage in which the principal characters are God, the Son, and Satan. Milton's seventeenth-century God is much more anthropomorphic than his twenty-first century descendant in which Milton's readers believe or disbelieve. The God of Paradise Lost can be ill-tempered and irrational, and to a modern reader can seem shockingly immodest in his insistence that the purpose of creation is to praise him. Milton's Son is also rooted in the century in which he was conceived. He does not have a pre-incarnate name, and is simply called the Son: in Paradise Regained Milton was to deploy his earthly name of Jesus, but he never used the term Christ to denote his character; indeed, he eschewed the term in all poems after 1646, when he used it in 'On the new forcers of conscience'. Milton's Son, like his New Testament original, 'came not to send peace, but a sword' and in Paradise Lost, he is, like the angels, primarily a warrior. The accounts of the war in heaven in book 6 and of the creation in book 7 both culminate in a celebration of the Son, whose achievements occlude the work of God the Father. In Puritan soteriology it was the Son rather than the Father who effected salvation, and so the Son is the central figure in the puritan godhead.

In the minds of many of its readers, the most important character in Paradise Lost is Milton's Satan, who dominates the first two books of the poem and in a magnificent soliloquy at the beginning of book 4 tries to establish himself as a tragic figure. Seventeenth-century readers shared with Milton an unshakeable conviction of the total and irredeemable depravity of Satan and so regarded him as a falsely heroic figure, but in succeeding centuries, as Enlightenment ideas eroded Christian belief, Satan gradually came to be seen as the truly heroic figure at the imaginative heart of the poem. In the nineteenth century Romantic Satanism spread through Germany as far as Russia, and in the twentieth century Milton was often said to have had an unconscious sympathy with the Satan of Paradise Lost.

Paradise Lost was finally completed by 1663, but Milton's reputation as a champion of the republic meant that he could not publish the poem immediately. The politically opportune moment for the publication of Paradise Lost finally arose in the spring of 1667. On 27 April Milton sealed a contract (now in the British Library) with the printer Samuel Simmons; Milton received £5 immediately, with the promise of another £5when the first edition of 1300 copies had been sold; the second and third editions, neither of which would exceed 1500 copies, would each generate an additional £5. Had the poem proved to be particularly popular, Milton stood to make £20. The first edition was exhausted in the spring of 1669, and on 26 April Simmons paid Milton another £5; the price seems to have been 3s. a copy, and so Simmons would have received £195. Milton died shortly after the second edition was published, and so he received only £10for Paradise Lost; after his death his widow sold the rights to the poem to Simmons for £8. The sums involved are modest but quite normal, and certainly no more derisory than the royalties paid by publishers in succeeding centuries.

Milton's epic was registered as 'Paradise Lost: a Poem in Ten Books' on 20 August 1667, and was published late in October or early in November. Sir John Denham is said (by Jonathan Richardson the elder) to have come into the House of Commons (which had reconvened on 10 October) carrying a sheet of Paradise Lost 'wet from the press' and proclaiming it 'part of the noblest poem that ever was wrote in any language or any age' (Masson, 6.628); by mid-November the poem was the subject of correspondence between John Beale and John Evelyn. The poem did not sell particularly quickly: between 1667 and 1669 six successive title-pages, each for a different issue, were required to sell the first edition of 1300 copies. The first three editions of Paradise Lostsold in modest numbers, but the fourth edition, a sumptuous gilt-edged folio published in 1688, was bought by subscription by many of the most influential readers in England, and thereafter the poem came to be widely regarded as England's national epic.

Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes
In August 1665 Milton had shown the unpublished manuscript of Paradise Lost to Thomas Ellwood, who read it and told Milton that 'thou hast said much here of Paradise Lost, but what hast thou to say of Paradise Found?' (Masson, 6.496). In the following year Ellwood visited Milton in London, and Milton showed him the manuscript of Paradise Regained, graciously telling Ellwood that 'this is owing to you; for you put it into my head by the question you put to me at Chalfont' (ibid., 6.654). It is possible that Paradise Regained, which depicts the temptations of Jesus in the desert, owes its pacific tone to the influence of the values of the Quaker community at Chalfont St Giles. The Jesus of Paradise Regained is not a warrior like the Son in book 6 of Paradise Lost, but rather a man who outwits his opponent. Milton's fictional Jesus is not, however, a sentimentalized figure: he denounces ordinary citizens as 'a herd confused, a miscellaneous rabble', so reflecting Milton's disdain for popular democracy, and he denounces the cultural accomplishments of ancient Greece, so reflecting the opinion of Milton in his late years that worldly learning was a vain pursuit; in taking this position he approaches the radical view that education, like riches, constituted an impediment to salvation.

In the autumn of 1671 Milton published Paradise Regained, a Poem in IV Books, to which is Added Samson Agonistes. The date of Paradise Regained can be ascertained by the testimony of Thomas Ellwood, but there can be no certainty about the date of Samson Agonistes. Topical references and stylistic markers show that Samson is substantially a post-Restoration work, though scholars debate whether it was written immediately after the Restoration or shortly before publication; on the other hand, echoes of the divorce tracts of the 1640s make an early stage of composition distinctly possible. It is difficult to gainsay the authoritative opinion of Edward Phillips, who noted that its date of composition 'cannot certainly be concluded'; as Henry Todd pointed out in his edition of 1801, Samson Agonistes 'furnishes some internal proofs of its having been composed at different periods'.

Samson Agonistes is a closet drama intended to be read rather than performed; it is therefore a literary rather than a dramatic work, and so claimed affinity with the plays of classical antiquity, which in seventeenth-century England were read rather than performed. The structure of the play is modelled on that of ancient Greek drama, but the characterization of Samson is resolutely modern. Like Racine, who was at the height of his powers when Milton published Samson Agonistes, Milton created a protagonist who was much more self-conscious than were the dramatic characters of antiquity; in this respect Milton's Samson has more in common with Hamlet than with Oedipus. Indeed, Samson is in some respects a Restoration nonconformist struggling to discern a pattern of divine intervention in his life. God is absent from Samson Agonistes, as he is in similar works such as Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress: for late seventeenth-century nonconformists, spiritual growth was not assisted by any vision of God. Samson's massacre of the Philistines at the end of the play also has a contemporary agenda: in Milton's version of the massacre it is only the Philistian lords that are killed, because 'the vulgar only scaped who stood without'. In Milton's view, retribution should be directed at political leaders rather than at those whom they lead.

Prose, 1669–1674
In 1669 Milton published his Accidence commenced grammar, supplied with sufficient rules for the use of such (younger or elder) as are desirous without more trouble than need to attain the Latin tongue, the elder sort especially, with little teaching and their own industry; it is not clear when Milton had written this primer of Latin accidence (that is, the variable forms of words) and grammar, but it is possible that it was a product of his years as a teacher in the 1640s.

In 1671 Milton published his History of Britain. The first four books had been drafted in February and March 1649, and the last two books seem to have been written in the mid-1650s, possibly in 1655. The most problematical element in the History is the digression, a passage in book 3 which was omitted from all editions until 1738, but published separately in 1681 as Character of the Long Parliament; this comparison of the ancient Britons at the time of the Roman withdrawal with the English in Milton's own time was probably written in 1648, but a case for composition in 1660 has been advanced.

In May 1672 Milton published his Joannis Milton Angli artis logicae plenior institutio ad Petri Rami methodum concinnata, adjucta est praxis analytica & Petri Rami vita ('A fuller course in the art of logic, arranged according to the method of Pierre de la Ramée; an analytical exercise and a life of La Ramée are appended'). The Ars logicae is a derivative Ramist treatise on logic drawn for the most part from a Latin commentary on Petrus Ramus by George Downham, as is the analytical exercise; the biography is a condensed version of the life of Ramus by Johann Freige. In the following year Milton published a revised edition of his minor poems and his first polemical tract since the Restoration, Of true religion, heresy, schism, toleration and what best means may be used against the growth of popery, which appeared early in May 1673. Charles II had promulgated the declaration of indulgence (which had suspended the penalties for Catholicism and nonconformity) in March 1672, but had been forced to rescind it in March 1673. Milton's tract is tolerant of the sectarians, who 'may have some errors, but are not heretics', but mounts a coruscating attack on Roman Catholicism, which he denounces as politically dangerous and theologically idolatrous.

In 1674 Milton published a volume containing a collection of thirty-one private letters (Epistolae familiares) and the Latin prolusions that he had delivered while a student in Cambridge. He had also saved many of his state papers, most of which were his translations into Latin of letters from the English government to the chancellaries of Europe, but these were not published until after his death. The first edition, Literae pseudo-senatûs Anglicani Cromwellii reliquorumque perduellium nomine ac jussu conscriptae a Joanne Miltono ('Letters written by John Milton in the name and by the order of the so-called English parliament of Cromwell and other traitors'), was printed by two different printers (in Amsterdam and Brussels) in October 1676; a preface carefully distances the edition from the politics of the reviled interregnum government by insisting disingenuously that the sole interest of the letters lies in their exemplary Latin style.

Milton's final political work was a translation of the Latin version of A Declaration, or, Letters Patent, a Polish tract advocating an elective monarchy; this pamphlet was a contribution to the Exclusion debate, in that it contests the Catholic succession, but its advocacy of a form of monarchy also implies that Milton may not have espoused unequivocally the republicanism with which he came to be associated after his death.

Last days
Milton's final publication, early in July 1674, was the second edition of Paradise Lost, which he had reorganized into twelve books, so making explicit the parallel with the epics of classical antiquity; this edition also contained two prefatory poems, one in Latin by ‘S. B.’ (probably Milton's physician friend Samuel Barrow) and one in English by Andrew Marvell. A few weeks after the publication of this edition, Milton prepared a nuncupative (that is, orally declared) will with the help of his brother Christopher. In his will Milton chose to recall with smouldering resentment that his first father-in-law, Richard Powell, had never paid the dowry of £1000 that was due to Milton on his marriage to Mary Powell. According to Christopher's testimony on 23 November, the will stated that 'the portion due to me from Mr Powell, my former wife's father, I leave to the unkind children I had by her, having received no part of it'. This worthless legacy of an unpaid dowry testifies to the bitterness of Milton's estrangement from his daughters; he left everything to Elizabeth, 'my loving wife'. Milton died, probably of renal failure associated with gout, on the night of 9–10 November 1674, at his home in Artillery Walk, and was buried beside his father near the altar in St Giles Cripplegate on 12 November.

Posthumous reputation
After his death Milton became associated with the whig cause. His enthusiastic praise of Queen Kristina was forgotten, as was his insistence in the Defensio secunda that he had written not against kings, but only against tyrants; instead, Milton came to be regarded as an unambiguous republican. Milton's republican ideas and ideals were eventually taken up in France and America. An anonymous pamphlet called Théorie de la royauté, d'après la doctrine de Milton (Paris, 1789) appropriated Milton to the revolutionary cause in France, and in 1792 Jacobin regicides reissued the French translation of Milton's Defensio prima. In the United States, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams drew on their wide reading in Milton's poetry and prose to articulate their republicanism: Franklin evoked the Chaos of Paradise Lost in his diatribe against British taxes in America, Jefferson deployed the arguments of Milton's anti-prelatical tracts to support the case for ecclesiastical disestablishment in Virginia, and Adams excoriated British rulers as embodiments of the arrogance and futile rebellion of Milton's Satan. Milton may rightly be regarded as one of the founding fathers of American and French republicanism, but in England he had no political progeny; English republicanism died on the scaffold with Algernon Sidney, and has never been successfully revived.

The 1695 edition of Paradise Lost included learned annotations by ‘P. H.’ (probably Patrick Hume), and so Milton's epic became the first English poem to be edited as if it were a classical text. Thereafter the poem attracted serious critical attention. In 1712 Joseph Addison published a series of 'Notes' on Paradise Lost in The Spectator, and these notes were soon translated into French (1727), German (1740), and Italian (1742). In 1732 Richard Bentley published an emended edition of Paradise Lost in which he ‘corrected’ hundreds of imagined errors in what he thought was a corrupt text; Bentley's misconceived erudition was soon discredited by scholars and mocked by satirists (including Pope, who included him in his Dunciad), but his edition and the analyses of his detractors demonstrate the care with which educated eighteenth-century readers attended to the text of Milton's poem. Later in the century Samuel Johnson included an insightful and opinionated critical biography of Milton in his Lives of the Poets (1779–81).

Paradise Lost was written in blank verse, but in the late seventeenth century portions of the poem were twice published in rhymed versions: John Dryden secured the permission of Milton to 'tag' (that is, rhyme) Paradise Lost for his operatic adaptation, The State of Innocence and Fall of Man (1677), and John Hopkins gallantly tried to offer assistance to ladies who found the poem too difficult by publishing a rhymed paraphrase of books 4 and 9 (1699). During this period translations into German (1682) and Latin (1686) rendered the poem accessible to European audiences.

In the eighteenth century Milton's epic was responsible for the shift from rhyme to blank verse, and also for many features of poetic diction and syntax. The style of Paradise Lost was imitated by classical translators such as Alexander Pope and Joseph Trapp and by poets such as Sir Richard Blackmore, John Dennis, Matthew Smith, and William Thompson; it was also parodied, most notably by John Philips (The Splendid Shilling, 1701) and John Gay (Wine, 1709). The taste for the picturesque that became an important factor in the gardens, paintings, and nature poetry of the eighteenth century took as its starting point Milton's Eden, a 'happy rural seat of various view'. What was perceived as the awesome seriousness of Paradise Lost became the corner-stone of the sublime, a concept so all-pervasive that Mary Wollstonecraft could complain in 1787 that she was 'sick of hearing of the sublimity of Milton'; this was not a complaint about Milton, but rather a protest about the invoking of the sublime as a substitute for a proper critical understanding of Milton's poetry. The process of translation continued apace throughout the eighteenth century, including versions of Paradise Lost in Dutch (1728), French (1729), Italian (1729), Greek (1735), Russian (1777), Norwegian (1787), Portuguese (1791), Polish (1791), Hungarian (1796), and Manx (1796).

The appropriation of Milton by the Romantic poets included both critical comment—Shelley and Blake championed Milton's Satan—and creative imitation, most notably The Prelude, in which Wordsworth aspires to establish himself as the successor to Milton. Blake illustrated all of Milton's major poems (except Samson Agonistes) and wrote two Miltonic poems, The Four Zoas (a rewriting of Paradise Lost) and Milton, a Poem in Two Books. The political Milton was also taken up as an early radical: as Wordsworth ringingly proclaims in 'London, 1802':

Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour:England hath need of thee.
In the course of the nineteenth century this idolatry led to Milton's enthronement as the national poet; the greatest monument to the national reverence for Milton was David Masson's vast seven-volume biography of Milton. At the same time the tide of faith in Milton's anthropomorphic God and his historical Adam and Eve was beginning to retreat, and the study of Milton seemed to some to be an exhausted endeavour; Sir Walter Raleigh memorably formulated this position when he conceded that 'Paradise Lost is a monument to dead ideas' (W. Raleigh, Milton, 1922, 88). Throughout the century new translations of Milton's poems continued to be published, including versions of Paradise Lost in Czech (1811), Spanish (1812), Swedish (1815), Icelandic (1818), Armenian (1819), Welsh (1819), Hebrew (1871), and Tongan (1892).

In the early twentieth century Milton fell 'on evil days and evil tongues' in his native England. The bitterest of those tongues was that of F. R. Leavis, who complacently announced in 1933 that 'Milton's dislodgement, in the past decade, after two centuries of predominance, was effected with remarkably little fuss'. This dislodgement, which Leavis attributed to the strictures of T. S. Eliot and J. Middleton Murry, proved to be an illusion beyond the narrow confines of the Cambridge of Leavis's day, though the popular idea of Milton as a grim misogynist has persisted; the most influential embodiment of this image is Robert Graves's Wife to Mr Milton (1943).

In the early twenty-first century Milton continues to be widely read. Schoolchildren in many countries still study Milton's poems (especially the sonnet on his blindness), Paradise Lost is studied in universities, and there is a substantial scholarly industry devoted to the study of Milton's works. There are large Milton societies in America and in Japan, and the learned presses continue to issue huge numbers of books and articles on Milton; there are even two journals wholly given over to Milton, Milton Quarterly and Milton Studies. For literary scholars and educated general readers alike, the poetry of Milton retains a central place in the canon of English literature. Paradise Lost is widely and rightly regarded as the supreme poetic achievement in the English language, fit to sit alongside the poems of Homer, Virgil, and Dante. In America, where Christianity is still a vital force, Paradise Lost is valued as the supreme epic of Christendom. In post-Christian Europe and in secular American circles, Paradise Lost has become a cultural battlefield for feminists and Freudians, cultural materialists and new historicists. These ephemeral ideologies have replaced earlier concerns with humanistic values and Christian ideas, and will in turn be supplanted by new critical fashions, but Paradise Lost will retain its importance as one of the greatest works of the human imagination."

FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs SMSgt Lawrence McCarter SPC Michael Duricko, Ph.D GySgt Thomas Vick SGT Denny Espinosa SSG Stephen Rogerson SPC Matthew Lamb LTC (Join to see) LTC Greg Henning Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D. PO1 William "Chip" Nagel PO2 (Join to see) SSG Franklin Briant SPC Woody Bullard TSgt David L. SMSgt David A Asbury MSgt Paul Connors

Great writer!

SGT (Join to see) Have many of us truly suffered compared to others? This bio is a captivating story of a stalwart man with an abnormal amount of sorrows in life,(death of siblings, deaths of 2 wives, blindness, prison) yet resolved not to blame God but wrote of Hope and Redemption.