John Milton Biography Quotes 29 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
John Milton was born in London in 1608, the son of John Milton, a scrivener who was also an accomplished amateur composer, and Sara Jeffery. Raised in a household that valued learning and music, he received an exacting early education and displayed precocious talent in languages and letters. He attended St Pauls School, where he immersed himself in Latin and Greek, and went on to Christs College, Cambridge. There he earned the usual degrees in the arts, refining a command of classical literature that would later shape his poetry and prose. A formative early mentor was the Scottish theologian Thomas Young, whose Puritan leanings helped direct Miltons religious and political sympathies. By the time he left Cambridge in the early 1630s, he had already composed accomplished Latin verse and was determined to pursue a literary vocation.

Apprenticeship in Poetry
After university, Milton withdrew to his fathers homes in Hammersmith and Horton, using these years for intensive study of classical authors, the Bible, and modern European poets. This period produced major early works in English, including the companion poems LAllegro and Il Penseroso, which contrast festive sociability with contemplative solitude; the masque Comus, performed at Ludlow Castle with music by Henry Lawes; and the pastoral elegy Lycidas, written in memory of his Cambridge contemporary Edward King, who had drowned at sea. These poems reveal his virtuosic ear, moral seriousness, and his ambition to renew English poetry by wedding classical form to Protestant ethical vision. The musical, rhetorical, and theatrical circles around Comus linked Milton with cultivated patrons and performers, foreshadowing the public claims he would later make for poetrys moral and civic uses.

Continental Travel and Intellectual Exchange
In 1638 Milton embarked on a tour of the Continent, traveling to France and Italy. In Paris he met scholars and diplomats, including the jurist Hugo Grotius. In Florence and Rome he frequented literary academies and absorbed living traditions of humanist eloquence and art. He later wrote that he saw Galileo, then old and under constraint, an encounter that crystallized for him the tensions between free inquiry and authority. News of rising conflict in England drew him home earlier than planned. The tour fortified his cosmopolitan learning, enlarged his sense of Europes intellectual debates, and sharpened his conviction that English letters could stand alongside the achievements of antiquity and the Renaissance.

Public Controversy and the English Revolution
Back in London, Milton opened a small school and tutored his nephews while launching a career as a polemicist. In the early 1640s he published anti-episcopal tracts arguing for reform of church governance, aligning himself with a Protestant and parliamentarian readership. His deeply personal crisis after his marriage to Mary Powell, who soon returned to her family, prompted a series of divorce pamphlets urging that Christian marriage be grounded in mutual companionship rather than merely in ceremony. In 1644 he issued Areopagitica, a ringing oration against prepublication licensing and an enduring defense of liberty of the press. He also wrote Of Education, proposing a rigorous curriculum that yokes classical learning to civic virtue. These writings set him at the center of public debate as England slid into civil war.

Service to the Commonwealth and Blindness
Following the execution of Charles I in 1649, Milton published The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, defending the right of a people to hold a ruler accountable. He was appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues, a Latin secretary to the Council of State, responsible for diplomatic correspondence and state propaganda. He answered royalist critics across Europe with learned Latin defenses, notably his rebuttal to Claudius Salmasius in Pro Populo Anglicano. The burden of work, together with a long-developing infirmity, culminated in total blindness by the early 1650s. Even so, he continued in office, aided by amanuenses. Andrew Marvell, the poet and Member of Parliament, joined him as a colleague and assistant, and John Thurloe, the governments secretary of state, coordinated the broader diplomatic machinery. Miltons resilience in blindness reshaped his writing practice: he composed in his head and dictated, often in the mornings, to pupils and family members.

Personal Loss and Consolation
Miltons first wife, Mary Powell, returned to him after an initial separation; they had several children before her death. His second marriage, to Katherine Woodcock, was brief and happy, ending with her death and that of their infant child. He memorialized her in Sonnet 23, a moving dream-vision of reunion. In 1662 he married Elizabeth Minshull, who helped manage his household during his later years. His daughters assisted as readers and copyists, though family relations were sometimes strained by the demands of dictation and the hardships of a reduced income after his government service ended. These domestic experiences informed his poetrys meditations on temptation, patience, marriage, and the uses of suffering.

Restoration, Peril, and Retreat
The collapse of the Protectorate after Oliver Cromwells death and the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 placed Milton in danger for his republican writings. He went into hiding, was arrested, and was briefly imprisoned; several of his books were ordered burned by the public hangman. He escaped a harsher sentence under the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, and friends, among them Andrew Marvell, interceded on his behalf. Partially withdrawn from public life, he settled in the Bunhill Fields area of London. Yet he remained intellectually active, publishing treatises and revising long-cherished poetic plans. During the Great Plague of 1665 he took refuge in the countryside at Chalfont St Giles, where the young Quaker Thomas Ellwood read for him; Ellwoods later remark on Paradise Lost prompted Miltons title for Paradise Regained, a small sign of the fruitful interactions that sustained his late work.

Paradise Lost and the Late Poems
Milton issued Paradise Lost in 1667, dictating a vast English epic in unrhymed iambic pentameter. Recasting the Fall of Man through a synthesis of biblical narrative and classical epic practice, he sought to justify the ways of God to men while probing questions of freedom, obedience, and the nature of heroism. The poem quickly commanded attention; John Dryden recognized its scale and adapted it for the stage, a gesture of homage from one leading poet to another. A revised edition of Paradise Lost, divided into twelve books, appeared in 1674. In 1671 Milton published Paradise Regained, a meditative sequel centered on Christs temptation in the wilderness, together with Samson Agonistes, a tragic drama that reflects on zeal, captivity, and the cost of resistance. He also brought out a second edition of his shorter poems, preserving the works of his youth alongside new sonnets such as When I consider how my light is spent, which gives voice to the trials of blindness.

Belief, Scholarship, and Prose
Miltons prose ranges across theology, politics, and history. His History of Britain assembled materials on the nations early past, while The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, written on the eve of the Restoration, pleaded unsuccessfully for a republican settlement. A Latin theological treatise, De Doctrina Christiana, discovered long after his death and generally attributed to him, reveals unorthodox positions on the Trinity and church polity, consistent with the independence of mind displayed throughout his career. His convictions grew from Scripture read in original languages and from a wide humanist curriculum; he engaged, often contentiously, with contemporaries across Europe and in England, from royalist polemicists to fellow reformers. His classical models were Homer and Virgil, but he learned equally from Dante and the Hebrew Bible, and from the English tradition of Spenser and, at a distance, Ben Jonson.

Final Years and Death
In later life Milton lived modestly, sustained by the sale of his copyrights, by pupils, and by the management of his household with Elizabeth Minshull. He continued to revise and publish, arranging materials, dictating letters, and receiving visitors who sought him out as a figure of literary and moral authority. He died in London in 1674 and was buried in the church of St Giles Cripplegate, not far from where he had been born. The circle that survived him included his daughters and friends such as Thomas Ellwood, who helped preserve recollections of his final years.

Legacy
Miltons achievement altered the course of English literature. He proved that unrhymed English verse could sustain epic argument and music; his handling of blank verse influenced later poets and dramatists. His sonnets expanded the form to public occasions and private crises. As a polemicist he articulated a powerful ideal of liberty of conscience and of expression, and his Areopagitica continues to be invoked in debates about censorship. The nineteenth century, from William Blake to Wordsworth and Shelley, rediscovered him as a prophetic voice wrestling with authority, creativity, and the moral drama of history. That wide influence rests on a life that joined scholarship to public service, domestic trial to imaginative triumph, and a poetical ambition conceived in youth to a late style forged in adversity. Through the tumult of civil war and the risks of Restoration politics, and despite blindness, Milton made of English a vehicle for the grandest of subjects and the most searching of moral inquiry.

Our collection contains 29 quotes who is written by John, under the main topics: Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth - Freedom - Nature.

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