Milton can be one of the most trying but is also one of the most rewarding Early Modern authors to read. Born in 1608, he was the son of a wealthy merchant who hoped his son would become a civil servant or cleric. Young Milton excelled at school, and, after getting expelled for impudence on his first enrollment, finally got his master’s at Cambridge. After graduating, he went home for six years and read extensively, occasionally trying a stint at tutoring but always returning home to the library. Finally, at age 30, his exasperated father sent him to Europe on the Grand Tour. After a year he came back and plunged himself into radical Puritan politics, writing the occasional poem. Somewhere by this point, probably while in Italy, he read Dante and Bocaccio, and like Chaucer, found in their works the challenge to create inspired English poetry.

In May 1642 Milton’s family arranged a marriage with a 17-year old Royalist girl, Mary Powell, whose family had a title and could help Milton’s career. Within 3 weeks the bride moved back home to her family and Milton started writing polemics agitating for legalized divorce. (Her family forced her to return to him in 1645 when their family’s political situation got parlous; she bore him three daughters before dying in 1652.) He also wrote widely (mostly in Latin) against Charles I and in support of Oliver Cromwell. When Cromwell took over the Commonwealth in 1649, Milton became his Latin (private) secretary for the Council of State—Cromwell’s closest confidant. He also went blind.

In 1656, Milton marries the Puritan Elizabeth Woodcock; she dies in childbirth (along with their son) in 1658. Woodcock is the subject of the sonnet "Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint."

In 1660, after the Restoration of Charles II, Milton was jailed and faced execution as a suspected "traitor and purveyor of sedition." He was freed thanks to the efforts of his admirer, the Royalist poet Andrew Marvell, but lost most of his (actually his first wife’s) estate in fines. He retired to a cottage in the country and married Elizabeth Minshull in 1663; she and his three daughters spent their days caring for him and reading to him, phonetically, in four ancient languages. In 1667 came the first edition of Paradise Lost; in 1671, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. Milton dies in 1674, shortly after the publication of the full (12-book) edition of Paradise Lost.

1. Sonnets. Milton’s sonnets are a fusion of the personal and the political. They can be revealingly intimate, as in the mourning sonnet for Elizabeth Woodcock or "When I Consider How My Light is Spent;" or they can be polemical diatribes like "To the Lord General Cromwell" or "On the Late Massacre in Piedmont." Petrarchan in form, they are utterly Miltonic in enjambment, diction, and above all, attitude.

2. Areopagitica. In 1644 Charles I’s government, increasingly worried about Puritan polemic, passed a law that all works published had to receive a government license (imprimatur) before being printed. The effect of this law was censorship—the government would license only those works that supported their positions and beliefs. Milton, in an act of incredible daring, paid a printer to publish his attack on censorship unlicensed—and put his name on the title page, taking credit for the act. The resultant paean to free speech is still used in US Supreme Court cases in defense of the First Amendment (see the wonderful Yale Law lecture linked on our web page for a summary of Milton’s value today). The parts you should know are pp. 1746-to the asterisks on p. 1748. The key passage is the paragraph on p. 1747 beginning "As therefore the state of man is now" and the most famous quotation is "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue….".

3. Lycidas. In 1637 one of Milton’s Cambridge classmates, a young clergyman named Edward King, was drowned in a shipwreck on the Irish Sea. His classmates, to comfort King’s mother and raise some money for the family, gathered poems and testimonials from people who knew him and published them in a book called Juxta Eduardo King [Concerning Edward King] in 1638. Of the material they published, clearly the work of most literary value is Milton’s pastoral elegy Lycidas. (It’s ironic, because apparently Milton barely knew King.)

Lycidas is a lament for a dead shepherd in form. The speaker is another poet, who mourns for Lycidas because of what a good shepherd he was. Like Chaucer with his Parson, Milton uses the motif of the shepherd to describe a clergyman who does his proper duties; apparently Milton thought King was a good clergyman. But the subject of Lycidas quickly shifts away from a celebration of King and a reflection on the fruitlessness of his death (l. 64 ff) to an attack on the Royalist Anglican clergy, whom the speaker sees as being corrupt and venal (St. Peter criticizes such clergy in lines 108 ff). The speaker prophecies that such clergy will be eternally punished (130-31), then returns to the pastoral conventions to argue that Lycidas will never die while we read poems about him and remember him in pity. The poem ends with the speaker poet declaring his intentions to go on and write great poems (rather conceited, but Milton never lacked self-confidence). The big passages to remember are the first 14 lines (pastoral conventions); the reflections on the thankless job clergymen have (64-84); the great couplet closing the St. Peter scene (130-31—and by the way, nobody has ever figured out this exact reference); the great couplet of pity for Lycidas (163-64); and the final defiant foreshadowing of the poetic career (186-193).

4. Paradise Lost. Epic poems get their names from their attempt to tell the story of an epoch—a significant time, a significant place, significant characters. In focusing on one story, the epic poet wants us to thing about all stories—all great levels, times, characters, histories. Milton in his youth considered writing an epic to end all epics. He at first thought about writing about King Arthur and his wars, as the ultimate British epic, but eventually decided that the only subject worth his abilities, scope, and time was the greatest epic of all—the War in Heaven that led Satan to be cast out and, in turn, corrupt Adam and Eve. While Milton apparently worked on bits and pieces of it (mostly Satan’s speeches in Bks. I & II) in the 1640s and 1650s, it wasn’t until his bitter retirement after the restoration that he completed the work, then expanded it to the form we know now.

The story is familiar: Lucifer, swollen with pride, rebels against God and is expelled, with his supporters, from Heaven. In the meantime God creates earth and implants Adam and Eve to begin peopling it. Satan in revenge tempts Eve, who causes Adam to fall also, and they are expelled from the Garden of Eden. God promises that his Son will come to redeem their descendents in appropriate time.

Milton, of course, expands the story greatly. Paradise Lost is, really, the last great epic poem (Tennyson tried, but didn’t outdo Milton, and nobody really has equaled his efforts since.) Paradise Lost is therefore significant on a number of levels:

a. Epic Level. This is an epic poem in scope and sweep; it is full of the devices we connect with epic: in medias res opening, epic similes, catalogs, invocations, stories of wayfaring and warfaring.

b. Dramatic Level. The Puritans had closed the theatres for spreading immorality, so "closet" drama was all poets could write. Milton’s poem is splendid blank verse, full of soliloquies and colloquies, and great "set" pieces (such as the devils rising from the sea of Hell and exploring their new lands). The poem is so rich in allusion and metaphor that it literally cannot be read without footnotes; when one realizes that Milton incorporated this heavy level of detail without being able to see his books, it’s really amazing.

c. Theological Level. Paradise Lost is the ultimate Early Modern confrontation of faith and reason; Milton’s announced purpose is "to justify the ways of God to man," as if God is not capable of doing the job but the Puritan poet was. The poem is about the importance of perfect obedience, about the dangers of rebellion, about the possibilities for redemption if one submits oneself totally to the Divine Yoke.

d. Poetic Level. Paradise Lost is a triumph of literary style. No poet in the English language has ever been more skilled with enjambment (look at the length of the first sentence of the poem if you want proof). The poem is beautifully structured, with parallelism, repetition, and foreshadowing. Events mirror each other. It is, in many ways, a textbook for how to write an epic poem—which Milton obviously intended.

Read Books I, II, and the selections from IV, IX, and XII carefully. Pay attention to Satan’s soliloquies, and to Adam and Eve’s conversations with each other and with Satan. Look at the repetition of the word pride and any references to Hell (for instance, IV 918 is the first instance in English of the expression "All Hell broke loose").