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John Milton(1608-1674)
One of the greatest poets of the English language, best-known for his epic poem PARADISE LOST(1667).Milton's powerful, rhetoric prose and the eloquence of his poetry had an immense influence especially on the 18th-century verse.Besides poems, Milton published pamphlets defending civil and religious rights.“Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,With lo of Eden.”
(from Paradise Lost)
John Milton was born in London.His mother, Sarah Jeffrey, a very religious person, was the daughter of a merchant sailor.Milton's father, named John, too, had risen to prosperity as a scrivener or law writerthere are references to Galileo's telescope in Paradise Lost.His conversation with the famous scientist Milton recorded in his celebrated plea for a free speech and free discuion, AREOPAGITICA(1644), in which he stated that books “preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect bred in them.” Milton returned to London in 1639, and set up a school with his nephews and a few others as pupils.He had planned to write an epic based on the Arthurian legends, but then gave up
his literary pursuits, partly due to the Civil War, which divided the country as Oliver Cromwell fought against the king, Charles I.Concerned with the Puritan cause, Milton published a series of pamphlets against episcopacy(1642), on divorce(1643), in defense of the liberty of the pre(1644), and in support of the regicides(1649).He also served as the secretary for foreign languages in Cromwell's government.After the death of Charles I, Milton expreed in THE TENURE OF KINGS AND MAGISTRATES(1649)the view that the people have the right to depose and punish tyrants.In 1651 Milton became blind, but like Jorge Luis Borges centuries later, blindne helped him to stimulate his verbal richne.“He sacrificed his sight, and then he remembered his first desire, that of being a poet,” Borges wrote in one of his lectures.One of his aistants was the poet and satirist Andew Marvell(1621-78), who spoke for him in Parliament, when his political opinions stirred much controversy.After the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, Milton was arrested as a noted defender of the Commonwealth, but was soon released.However, for his opposition Milton was forced to pay a maive fine.Besides public burning of EIKONKLASTES(1649)and the first DEFENSIO(1651)in Paris and Toulouse, Milton escaped from more punishment, but he became a relatively poor man.The manuscript of Paradise Lost he sold for £5 to Samuel Simmons, and was promised another £5 if the first edition of 1,300 copies sold out.This was done in 18 months.Milton was married three times.His first marriage started unhappily;this experience promted the poet to write his famous eays on divorce.He had married in 1642 Mary Powell, seventeen at that time.She grew soon bored with her busy husbandand went back home where she stayed for three years.Their first child, Anne, was born in 1646.Mary died in 1652 and four years later Milton married Katherine Woodcock;she died in 1658.For her memory Milton devoted the sonnet 'To His Late Wife'.In the 1660s Milton moved with his third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, again a much younger woman, to what is now Bunhill Row.The marriage was happy, in spite of the great difference of their ages.Milton spent in Bunhill Row the remaining years of his life, apart from a brief visit to Chalfont St Giles in 1665 during a period of plague.His late poems Milton dictated to his daughter, nephews, friends, disciples, and paid amanuenses.In THE DOCTRINE AND DISCIPLINE OF DIVORCE(1643), composed after Mary had deserter him, Milton argued that a true marriage was of mind as well as of body, and that the chaste and modest were more likely to find themselves “chained unnaturally together” in unsuitable unions than those who had in youth lived loosely and enjoyed more varied experience.Though Milton morally austere and conscientious, some of his religious beliefs were very unconventional, and came in conflict with the official Puritan stand.Milton who did not believe in the divine birth, “believed perhaps nothing”, as Ford Madox Ford says in The March of Literature(1938).Milton died on November 8, 1674.He was buried beside his father in the church of St Giles, Cripplegate.It has been claimed that Milton's grave was desecrated when the church was undergoing repairs.All the teeth and “a large quantity of the hair” were taken as souvenirs by grave robbers.Milton's achievement in the field of poetry was recognized after the appearance of Paradise Lost.Before it the writer himself had showed some doubt of the worth of his work: “By labor and intent study(which I take to be my portion in this life), joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to after-times, as they should not willingly let it die.”(from The Reason of Church Government, 1641)Milton's cosmic vision has occasionally provoked critical discuion.Even T.S.Eliot has attacked the author and described him as one whose sensuousne had been “withered by book-learning.” Eliot claimed that Milton's poetry '“could only be an influence for the worse.”
The theme of Fall and expulsion from Eden had been in Milton's mind from the 1640s.His ambition was to compose an epic poem to rival the ancient poets, such as Homer and Virgil, whose grand vision in Aeneid left traces in his work.Originally it was iued in 10 books in 1667, and in 12 books in the second edition of 1674.Milton, who wanted to be a great poet, had also cope with the towering figure of Shakespeare, who had died in 1616a rebel against the tyranny of Heaven.The troubled times, in which Milton lived, is also seen on his theme of religious conflict.In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake stated that Milton is “a true Poet, and of the Devil's party without knowing it.” Many other works of art have been inspired by Paradise Lost, among them Joseph Haydn's oratorio The Creation, Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad, John Keat's poem Endymion, Lord Byron's The Vision of Judgment, the satanic Sauron in J.R.R.Tolkien's saga The Lord of the Rings.Noteworthy, Nietzsche's Zarathustra has more superficial than real connections with Milton's Lucifer, although Nietzsche knew Milton's work.
