(1608-1674) English poet. His epic Paradise Lost 1667 is one of the landmarks of English literature. Early poems, including Comus (a masque performed 1634) and Lycidas (an elegy 1638), showed Milton’s superlative lyric gift. Latin secretary to Oliver Cromwell during the Commonwealth period, he also wrote many pamphlets and prose works, including Areopagitica 1644, which opposed press censorship.
Born in London and educated at Christ’s College, Cambridge, Milton was a scholarly poet, ambitious to match the classical epics, and with strong theological views. Of polemical temperament, he published prose works on republicanism and church government. His middle years were devoted to the Puritan cause and writing pamphlets, including The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce 1643, which was based on his own experience of marital unhappiness. From 1649 he was (Latin) secretary to the Council of State. His assistants, as his sight failed, included Andrew Marvell. Paradise Lost 1667 and the less successful sequel Paradise Regained 1671 were written when he was blind and in some political danger (after the restoration of Charles II), as was Samson Agonistes 1671, a powerful if untheatrical play.
Milton married Mary Powell 1643, and their three daughters were later his somewhat unwilling scribes. After Mary's death 1652, the year of his total blindness, he married twice more, his second wife Catherine Woodcock dying in childbirth, whereas Elizabeth Minshull survived him for over half a century. He is buried in St Giles's, Cripplegate, London. + prikaži više