John Milton: the Paradise Lost author who challenged the status quo

What is John Milton’s Paradise Lost about?

Paradise Lost is an epic poem of more than 10,000 non-rhyming lines that charts humanity’s fall from grace. It is Milton’s version of the biblical story of the temptation of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

The poem tapped into debates about free will and disobeying authority, which struck a chord in the period in which Milton was writing – following the Civil War and the Restoration of the monarchy with Charles II. Adding to the controversy was his sympathetic, complex portrayal of Satan.

Embarking on a work this grand in scale and contentious in subject had not been undertaken lightly. “It's something that Milton conceived decades before it was published,” says Professor Islam Issa, who spoke about John Milton for our Life of the Week podcast series.

• On the podcast | Islam Issa charts the life and work of the 17th-century poet and polemicist John Milton

“There's a draft that shows us that he wanted to write a tragedy called Adam Unparadised,” he says. “But Milton ended up writing an epic poem, a specific type of long-verse narrative of the kind that had been written by Homer and Virgil in the ancient world. It always features major heroes, concerns a series of issues, and has an expansive setting.”

In this case, that setting was heaven, hell and Earth.

What are John Milton’s most famous works?

Of the dozens of poems, prose and pamphlets that Milton wrote during his life, here are some of the most famous:

• Paradise Lost, Milton’s masterpiece, which was first published in 1667 and appeared as a revised second edition in 1674. The epic poem’s themes of freedom and disobedience, and imagery of chaos, light and darkness proved hugely influential.
• The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 1643, the first of four pamphlets that argued for divorce on the grounds of mutual incompatibility. This was met by fierce opposition from those who considered the matter heretical.
• Areopagitica, a 1644 polemic in favour of freedom of speech and expression. Vehemently opposed to licensing, it was written in response to government legislation requiring every book to be read and approved by a censor before publication. Milton famously compared suppressing books to murder.

What do we know about John Milton’s early life?

John Milton was born on 9 December 1608 in Bread Street, London. He was the second of three surviving children of John Milton senior and Sarah Jeffrey.

Milton’s father had been disinherited by his Catholic father for reading an English-language Bible (and so accepting Protestantism) but had set up a successful business in London as a scrivener, writing official documents. Skilled at reading and writing, Milton senior ran his business from the family home.

He also worked as a moneylender or broker, which proved to be a lucrative trade – a line of work that Milton himself would take up as an adult.

• Read more | Long road to paradise: the life of John Milton and how he created his masterpiece, Paradise Lost

How was Milton educated?

Milton’s later work demonstrates an expansive education, drawing on classical texts and contemporary ideas alike. “Because his father was earning good money, Milton was able to have private tuition, get an education in the classical languages, and follow his passions and travel,” says Issa. “I don’t think he ever really had any pressure to earn money, because his father was so good at it.”

However, Issa stresses that Milton’s talent as a writer was due to his individual intellect. “He was especially interested in languages, and he was unusual in the extent to which he was really well-versed in them,” he notes.

“When he did end up going to university in Cambridge, he was obviously an odd one out. I don’t think he was a regular learner.”

When did John Milton become a radical?

It was during his studies at the University of Cambridge that Milton first started showing signs of refusing to conform to established ideas, suggests Issa. “He was tutored by William Chappell [an English scholar who later was made a bishop], but the two men fell out and Milton got suspended.

“We don't know all that much about the nature of that fallout, but he returned to London as a result. And it seems that he was still in his 20s when he began opposing ideas of the church and the monarchy.”

Milton later returned to Cambridge and graduated in 1629, then undertaking a master’s degree in 1632. At that point, he intended to enter the ministry.

Instead, he returned to the family home and spent the next six years reading extensively. In 1638, he embarked on a journey around Europe for around 15 months, visiting France, Italy and Switzerland.

One of Milton’s most important stops was Florence, a key capital of the European Renaissance. “Milton regularly met up with writers and thinkers, and was made to feel really welcome,” says Issa.

It was in Florence that he met Vincenzo Galilei, the illegitimate son of the famous Renaissance astronomer Galileo. Now in his 70s, and blind, the astronomer was essentially under house arrest for expressing the heretical theory that the Earth moves around the Sun. The church had forced him to recant his beliefs.

Milton, aged around 30, went to visit the elderly Galileo. “Milton and Galileo together: it is an amazing image,” Issa enthuses. “It’s been described as akin to one of those special issues of a comic in which Batman meets Superman. The meeting had a huge impact on Milton, and I think a willingness to challenge authority was born in him at that point.”

What do we know about John Milton’s personal life?

Once back in England in 1639, Milton worked as a moneylender in London. It was in this capacity that, in 1642, he travelled to Oxfordshire to collect a payment, only to return with the debtor’s daughter, Mary Powell, as his wife.

“It was an interestingly quick marriage, to someone half Milton’s age,” Issa points out, as Milton was 33 and Mary was 17.

The match was to end just as quickly as it began, however, as within just a few weeks Milton’s new wife had travelled back to her family home. “There’s an assumption that Milton was difficult to live with. It’s probably true that Mary couldn’t adapt to his more austere lifestyle,” says Issa.

Perhaps another reason for their split was political difference. “The civil war was about to kick off, pitting royalists against republicans. Powell’s family was on the royalist side, while Milton was very much on the republican side.”

At this point, Milton redirected his intellectual energies to the legality and morality of divorce. This included The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), which argued that the dissolution of a marriage should be possible on the grounds of incompatibility.

Not long afterwards however, Milton would rekindle his marriage with Mary following an unsuccessful courtship with another woman. In the mid-1640s, the two moved back in together in a large house in London’s Barbican area. They had four children, of which three survived.

Following Mary’s death in 1652, Milton married two further times: to Katherine Woodcock in 1656 and, five years after her death, to Elizabeth Minshull from 1663. He would stay with Elizabeth until his own death in 1674.

Great reputations

Member exclusive | In our podcast series, expert historians discuss the contested reputations of key historical figures, charting the lives and afterlives of Cleopatra, Napoleon Bonaparte, Emmeline Pankhurst and more…

Listen to all episodes now

When did Milton go blind?

From his early years, Milton had weak eyesight, but it began to deteriorate during the 1640s. At first, he lost vision in one eye; by 1652, he had become permanently blind.

“In terms of what it did to him psychologically, he referred to it very often in his writing thereafter – particularly in his poetry, where he had the room to manoeuvre with his imagination and literary devices,” says Issa.

“There’s a poem about his late wife, Katherine, in which he says he dreams about her dressed all in white and wearing a veil – so, essentially, almost faceless. He ends it with ‘But Oh! as to embrace me she inclin'd / I wak'd, she fled, and day brought back my night’.

“In other words, he almost prefers night-time – when he can see vividly in his dreams – to daytime, when he can’t. Ideas of darkness and light recur frequently throughout Paradise Lost, too,” Issa adds.

What role did John Milton have in the Civil War?

His republican views, and writings in opposition to the monarchy, show that Milton aligned himself with Oliver Cromwell and the parliamentary side. “The parliamentarians were arguing that the monarch’s supremacy shouldn’t extend to areas such as religion, and that there should be a constitutional monarchy,” says Issa.

Milton was deeply invested in such arguments from the start. “He began to synthesise different ideas about leadership, liberty and religion.

“When Charles I began advancing towards London following the 1642 battle of Edgehill, for instance, Milton wrote a sonnet called When the Assault was Intended to the City, which seems to suggest he was scared about the existential threat the king’s advance posed to London and to his views.”

Milton’s loyalty to the parliamentarian cause paid off as the Civil War came to an end and Charles I was executed in 1649.

“Milton hadn’t just written poetry during the conflict, but also really important pieces of prose promoting republicanism and justifying regicide,” Islam notes. “He very much admired Cromwell, and was viewed favourably in turn.”

What role did Milton have in Cromwell’s government?

Milton held the position of Secretary for Foreign Tongues in Oliver Cromwell’s government from 1649 to 1660. “The best way I can describe the role is as a kind of language minister,” says Issa. “The international language of communication at the time was Latin, so his day-to-day tasks involved a lot of translating.”

But the fact that Cromwell’s revolutionary government was widely regarded with wariness on the European continent meant that Milton had plenty of free time. “Despite having staff and a good salary, he didn’t really have his work cut out for him. This meant he could channel his energies into writing.”

What happened to Milton when the monarchy was restored?

Following Cromwell’s death in 1658, the Commonwealth that he had led struggled under the rule of his son, Richard, who was unpopular and lacked his father’s abilities. Royalist plans to reinstate the monarchy strengthened and eventually led to the return of King Charles I’s exiled son from the Netherlands in May 1660.

The Restoration of the monarchy was bad news for parliamentarian supporters, Milton among them. “He had to go into hiding, but was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London,” says Issa. “Although he evaded execution, his books were burned, and many of his friends were killed. His dreams were shattered.”

Yet despite his fall from power, and his blindness requiring him to dictate his words to scribes, Milton continued work on the epic poem that was to become his magnum opus: Paradise Lost.

How does Paradise Lost reflect the upheavals of the 17th century?

Paradise Lost has been interpreted as being critical of those in power, who are represented by God. “Milton starts the poem by saying that he's going to justify the ways of God to men, which would have been seen as a strange thing to say at the time because it suggests that God’s ways need justification,” says Issa.

Some of this criticism, he argues, is more subtle. “Paradise Lost is unrhymed, which gave Milton freedom to write as he pleased.

“He specifically talks about rhyme as being a bondage […] this might be a symbol for the monarchy: it's constraining, and Milton instead opts for the freedom of not having to rhyme,” Issa explains.

What was the reaction to Paradise Lost?

John Milton’s reputation following the Restoration made it difficult to get his work published, but things had begun to calm down by the mid-1660s. The first version of Paradise Lost was published in 1667.

“One of the first recorded reactions upon its publication is from an MP called Sir John Denham, who is said to have gone to the House of Commons carrying Paradise Lost ‘wet from the press’,” according to Issa.

“Denham is recorded as saying: ‘This is the noblest poem that ever was written in any language or in any age’. Even royalists saw the epic nature of the poem, how imaginative it was, and how well written it was.”

While Paradise Lost received such acclaim, initial editions sold only small numbers. It would not be until after Milton’s death that the poem reached the peak of its popularity.

How influential was Paradise Lost?

Milton’s Paradise Lost went on to influence poets, painters, politicians and a host of other famous figures in the centuries since its publication. Issa highlights just a handful of the most notable examples:

• William Blake, the Romantic-era poet and painter, who illustrated scenes from Paradise Lost on numerous occasions, and whose early 19th-century epic poem Milton features the writer as its central character.
• Mary Shelley, whose 1818 Gothic novel Frankenstein was heavily influenced by Milton’s work.
• Malcolm X, the American civil-rights activist, who read Milton’s masterpiece during his imprisonment between 1946 and 1952.
• Philip Pullman, who took the title from his bestselling fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials, published from 1995–2000, from a phrase in Paradise Lost.

When did Milton die?

Milton died at home in London on 8 November 1674, just as he turned 66. Given that he had suffered from gout throughout his life, it is thought that his death may have been caused by kidney failure.

Where is John Milton buried?

John Milton was buried alongside his father in the churchyard of St Giles, Fore Street, London. Today, a statue and a memorial can be seen inside the church.