John milton short biography

(1608-1674)

from http://famouspoetsandpoems.com

Biography:

Title Page of the First Edition of Paradise Lost

John Milton was a 17th century historian, journalist and poet born on December 9th, 1608 in London, England. He was best known for his writing of Paradise Lost. Milton first planned to become a priest. He studied at Cambridge University and afterwards decided to abandon this path to become a full time writer and poet. Milton became very active in politics, and often wrote political pamphlets along with his other writings. As a protestant who believed in freedom of worship, Milton was often at odds with the Roman Catholic Church, an organization strongly opposed to the protestants. Eventually, John Milton would work for the English government under Oliver Cromwell after the removal of the monarchy.

Milton married in 1643 to Mary Powell, but this marriage was deemed a disaster. During this time Milton began writing about divorce and the merits that came along with it. These works were denounced by Parliament and the marriage marked some of the hard

John Milton is a man who has earned the reputation of being one of the most brilliant and greatest English poets in literature. Milton’s life was filled with revolution, dynamic progression, and especially the controversy that had surrounded his ideas and methods. His name has become a trademark and possibly the core of the English canon (Rogers). His most famous work is Paradise Lost, which is also widely regarded as being one of the greatest pieces of English literature to date. Milton was blessed with an education from which he grew up into a man of epic proportions, wielding a talented tongue of many languages alongside his epic poetic abilities. Milton’s life experiences and studies both intertwined together to influence his creations, ideas, inspirations, and ultimately Paradise Lost. Studying works such as Homer’s Odyssey, The Iliad, and Virgil’s Aeneid had motivated Milton to create his own English epic that would surpass these previous classics. Milton’s plan of creating an epic poem about Arthur and his knights had blossomed into something en

Fig.1

Originally published in 1667, John Milton’s Paradise Lost is an epic poem that retells the story of the Fall of Man. With its portrayal of God and Satan, and its detailed depiction of the cosmos, it has become one of the most influential poems in English literature. In Univ’s copy of the first illustrated edition, published in 1688, Milton’s vision is spectacularly brought to life.

Born in 1608 and educated at Christ’s College Cambridge, John Milton was a renowned poet and polemicist in a period of great political and religious unrest (see Fig.1, above).  An official in Oliver Cromwell’s Republic, his political allegiances forced him into hiding after the restoration of Charles II, and later resulted in his arrest and imprisonment.  Despite this interruption and becoming permanently blind in the early 1650s however, Milton produced many political and theological works as well as numerous poems.

Fig.2

Milton began Paradise Lost in 1658 prior to his imprisonment and completed it in 1663.  Following a brief account of Man’s Fall, he takes up the story with Satan and

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