John Milton was born in
London. His
mother Sarah Jeffrey, a very religious person, was the daughter of a merchant
sailor. His father, also named John, had risen to prosperity as a scrivener or
law writer - he also composed music. The family was wealthy enough to afford a
second house in the country. Milton's first
teachers were his father, from whom he inherited love for art and music, and the
writer Thomas Young, a graduate of St Andrews University. At the age of twelve Milton was admitted to St
Paul's School near his home and five years later he entered Christ's
College, Cambridge. During this period, while
considering himself destined for the ministry, he began to write poetry in
Latin, Italian, and English. One of Milton'e earliest works, 'On the Death of a
Fair Infant' (1626), was written after his sister Anne Phillips has suffered
from a miscarriage.
Milton did not adjust to university life. He was called, half
in scorn, "The Lady of Christ's", and after starting a fist fight with his
tutor, he was expelled for a term. On leaving Cambridge Milton had given up his
original plan to become a priest. He adopted no profession but spent six years
at leisure in his father's home, writing during that time L'ALLEGRO, IL
PENSEROSO (1632), COMUS (1634), and LYCIDAS (1637), written after the death of
his friend Edward King. In 1635 the Miltons moved to Horton, Buckinghamshire, where
John pursued his studies in Greek, Latin, and Italian. He traveled in
France and
Italy in the late 1630s,
meeting in Paris the jurist and theologian Hugo
Grotius and the astronomer Galileo Galilei in Florence - there are references to Galileo's
telescope in Paradise Lost. His conversation with the scientist Milton
recorded in his celebrated plea for a free speech and free discussion,
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. During this period he did not write much,
earlier he had planned to write an epic based on the Arthurian legends. The
Civil War silenced his poetic work for 20 years. War divided the country as
Oliver Cromwell fought against the king, Charles I.
Concerned with the Puritan
cause, Milton
wrote a series of pamphlets against episcopacy (1642), on divorce (1643), in
defense of the liberty of the press (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 published THE TENURE OF KINGS AND
MAGISTRATES (1649) supporting the view that the people had the right to depose
and punish tyrants.
In 1651 Milton became blind, but
like Jorge Luis Borges centuries later, blindness helped him to stimulate his
verbal richness. "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
assistants was the poet and satirist Andew Marvell (1621-78), who spoke for him
in Parliament, when his political opinions arouse much contoversy. After the
Restoration of Charles II in 1660, Milton was arrested as a noted defender of the
Commonwealth, but was soon released. Milton paid a massive fine for his opposition.
Besides public burning of EIKONKLASTES (1649) and the first DEFENSIO (1651) in
Paris and Toulouse, Milton escaped from more punishment after
Restoration, 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.
In the 1660s Milton moved with his
third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, again a much younger woman, to what is now
Burnhill Row. The marriage was happy, in spite of the great difference of their
ages. He spent in Bunhill Row the remaining years of his life, apart from a
brief visit to Chalfont St Giles in 1665, to avoid the plague. His late poems
were dictated to his daughter, nephews, friends, disciples, and paid amanuenses.
Milton was married three times. His first marriage started
unhappily; this experiences promted Milton to write his famous essays on divorce.
He had married in 1642 Mary Powell, who was seventeen at that time. She grew
soon bored with the poet and 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, who died in 1658. For her memory Milton devoted his sonnet
'To His Late Wife'.
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 was Puritan, morally austere and
conscientious, some of his religious beliefs were very unconventional, and were
in conflict with the official Puritan stand. He did not believe in the divine
birth, and "believed perhaps nothing", as Ford Madox Ford says in The March
of Literature (1938).
Milton died on November 8,
1674 in Chalfont, St.
Giles, Buckinghamshire. He was buried beside his father in St Giles',
Cripplegate. Many writers believe 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 position 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 personality and achievement still
arouse critical discussion. Even T.S. Eliot has attacked the author and
described him as one whose sensuousness had been "withered by book-learning."
Eliot claimed that Milton's poetry '"could only be an
influence for the worse."
