John Milton

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John Milton

Portrait of Milton c. 1629, National Portrait Gallery, London. Unknown artist (detail)
Born 9 December 1608 (Old style)
Bread Street, Cheapside, London, England
Died 8 November 1674 (aged 65)
Bunhill, London, England
Resting place St Giles-without-Cripplegate
Occupation Poet, prose polemicist, civil servant
Language English, Latin, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, Aramaic, Syriac
Nationality English
Alma mater Christ’s College, Cambridge
Signature

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WikiQuote

  • What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones,
    The labor of an age in pilèd stones,
    Or that his hallowed relics should be hid
    Under a star-y-pointing pyramid?
    Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,
    What need’st thou such weak witness of thy name?

    • On Shakespeare (1630).
  • And so sepúlchred in such pomp dost lie,
    That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.

    • On Shakespeare (1630).
  • How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,
    Stol’n on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!

    • On His Having Arrived at the Age of Twenty-three (1631).
  • Captain or Colonel, or Knight in Arms,
    Whose chance on these defenceless doors may seize,
    If ever deed of honour did thee please,
    Guard them, and him within protect from harms.

    • Sonnet VIII: When the Assault was Intended to the City.
  • The great Emathian conqueror bid spare
    The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower
    Went to the ground.

    • Sonnet VIII: When the Assault was intended to the City.
  • Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie.
    • Arcades (1630-1634), line 68.
  • Under the shady roof
    Of branching elm star-proof.

    • Arcades (1630-1634), line 88.
  • Fly, envious Time, till thou run out thy race:
    Call on the lazy leaden-stepping Hours,
    Whose speed is but the heavy plummet’s pace;
    And glut thyself with what thy womb devours,
    Which is no more than what is false and vain,
    And merely mortal dross.

    • On Time (1633–34).
  • O nightingale, that on yon bloomy spray
    Warbl’st at eve, when all the woods are still.

    • Sonnet, To the Nightingale (c. 1637).
  • Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heaven’s joy,
    • At a Solemn Music (c. 1637), line 1.
  • Where the bright seraphim in burning row
    Their loud uplifted angel trumpets blow.

    • At a Solemn Music.
  • A poet soaring in the high reason of his fancies, with his garland and singing robes about him.
    • The Reason of Church Government (1641), Book II, Introduction.
  • 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.
    • The Reason of Church Government (1641), Book II, Introduction.
  • He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem.
    • Apology for Smectymnuus (1642).
  • His words … like so many nimble and airy servitors trip about him at command.
    • Apology for Smectymnuus (1642).
  • I will not deny but that the best apology against false accusers is silence and sufferance, and honest deeds set against dishonest words.
    • Apology for Smectymnuus (1642).
  • So little care they of beasts to make them men, that by their sorcerous doctrine of formalities, they take the way to transform them out of Christian men into judaizing beasts. Had they but taught the land, or suffered it to be taught, as Christ would it should have been in all plenteous dispensation of the word, then the poor mechanic might have so accustomed his ear to good teaching, as to have discerned between faithful teachers and false. But now, with a most inhuman cruelty, they who have put out the people’s eyes, reproach them of their blindness; just as the Pharisees their true fathers were wont, who could not endure that the people should be thought competent judges of Christ’s doctrine, although we know they judged far better than those great rabbis: yet “this people,” said they, “that know not the law is accursed.”
    • Apology for Smectymnuus (1642), section VIII.
  • Truth…never comes into the world but like a bastard, to the ignominy of him that brought her forth.
    • The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), Introduction.
  • Truth is as impossible to be soiled by any outward touch as the sunbeam.
    • The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), Introduction. Compare: “The sun, which passeth through pollutions and itself remains as pure as before”, Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learning, Book ii (1605).
  • Men of most renowned virtue have sometimes by transgressing most truly kept the law.
    • Tetrachordon (1644–1645).
  • New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ Large.
    • On the new forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament (1645).
  • For other things mild Heav’n a time ordains,
    And disapproves that care, though wise in show,
    That with superfluous burden loads the day,
    And, when God sends a cheerful hour, refrains.

    • To Cyriack Skinner (1646–1647).
  • For such kind of borrowing as this, if it be not bettered by the borrower, among good authors is accounted Plagiarè.
    • Eikonoklastes (1649), 23.
  • None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license.
    • Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649).
  • No man who knows aught, can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were born free.
    • Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649).
  • Peace hath her victories
    No less renowned than war.

    • To the Lord General Cromwell (1652).
  • When I consider how my light is spent,
    Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
    And that one talent which is death to hide
    Lodged with me useless.

    • On His Blindness (1652).
  • Who best
    Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best: his state
    Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed,
    And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
    They also serve who only stand and wait.

    • On His Blindness (1652).
  • Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
    Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
    Ev’n them who kept thy truth so pure of old
    When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones
    Forget not.

    • On the Late Massacre in Piedmont (1655).
  • Cyriack, whose Grandsire on the Royal Bench
    Of British Themis, with no mean applause
    Pronounced and in his volumes taught our Laws,
    Which others at their Bar so often wrench

    • To Cyriack Skinner (1655).
  • Yet I argue not
    Against Heav’n’s hand or will, nor bate one jot
    Of heart or hope; but still bear up, and steer
    Right onward.

    • To Cyriack Skinner, upon His Blindness (c. 1655).
  • Of which all Europe rings from side to side.
    • To Cyriack Skinner, upon His Blindness (c. 1655).
  • In mirth that after no repenting draws.
    • To Cyriack Skinner, upon His Blindness (c. 1655).
  • Lawrence, of virtuous father virtuous son
    • To Mr. Lawrence (1656).
  • Methought I saw my late espousèd saint
    Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave.

    • On His Deceased Wife (c. 1658).
  • But oh! as to embrace me she inclined,
    I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.

    • On His Deceased Wife (c. 1658).
  • [Rhyme is] but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meter; … Not without cause therefore some both Italian and Spanish poets of prime note have rejected rhyme, … as have also long since our best English tragedies, as… trivial and of no true musical delight; which [truly] consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoided by the learned ancients both in poetry and all good oratory.
    • Introduction to Paradise Lost Added, 1668.
  • Such bickerings to recount, met often in these our writers, what more worth is it than to chronicle the wars of kites or crows flocking and fighting in the air?
    • The History of England (1670), Book IV .
  • For stories teach us, that liberty sought out of season, in a corrupt and degenerate age, brought Rome itself to a farther slavery: for liberty hath a sharp and double edge, fit only to be handled by just and virtuous men; to bad and dissolute, it becomes a mischief unwieldy in their own hands: neither is it completely given, but by them who have the happy skill to know what is grievance and unjust to a people, and how to remove it wisely; what good laws are wanting, and how to frame them substantially, that good men may enjoy the freedom which they merit, and the bad the curb which they need.
  • Madam, methinks I see him living yet;
    So well your words his noble virtues praise,
    That all both judge you to relate them true,
    And to possess them, honour’d Margaret.

  • The end of learning is to know God, and out of that knowledge to love Him and imitate Him.
    • Quote reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 364.
  • Such as may make thee search the coffers round.
    • At a Vacation Exercise. Line 31, reported in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
  • O fairest flower! no sooner blown but blasted,
    Soft silken primrose fading timelessly.

    • Ode on the Death of a fair Infant, dying of a Cough, reported in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
  • Thy liquid notes that close the eye of day.
    • Sonnet to the Nightingale, reported in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare: “That well by reason men it call may / The daisie, or els the eye of the day, / The emprise, and floure of floures all”, Geoffrey Chaucer, Prologue of the Legend of Good Women, line 183.
  • As ever in my great Taskmaster’s eye.
    • On his being arrived to the Age of Twenty-three, reported in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
  • That old man eloquent.
    • To the Lady Margaret Ley, reported in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
  • That would have made Quintilian stare and gasp.
    • On the Detraction which followed upon my writing certain Treatises, reported in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
  • License they mean when they cry, Liberty!
    For who loves that must first be wise and good.

    • On the Detraction which followed upon my writing certain Treatises, reported in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
  • What neat repast shall feast us, light and choice,
    Of Attic taste?

    • To Mr. Lawrence.
  • Have hung
    My dank and dropping weeds
    To the stern god of sea.

    • Translation of Horace. Book i. Ode 5.
  • Beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies.
    • The Reason of Church Government, Introduction, Book ii.
  • I neither oblige the belief of other person, nor overhastily subscribe mine own. Nor have I stood with others computing or collating years and chronologies, lest I should be vainly curious about the time and circumstance of things, whereof the substance is so much in doubt. By this time, like one who had set out on his way by night, and travelled through a region of smooth or idle dreams, our history now arrives on the confines, where daylight and truth meet us with a clear dawn, representing to our view, though at a far distance, true colours and shapes.
    • The History of England, Book ii.

On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity (1629)

  • This is the month, and this the happy morn,
    Wherein the Son of Heav’n’s eternal King,
    Of wedded maid and virgin mother born,
    Our great redemption from above did bring;
    For so the holy sages once did sing,
    That He our deadly forfeit should release,
    And with His Father work us a perpetual peace.

    • Stanza 1, line 1.
  • It was the winter wild
    While the Heav’n-born child
    All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies.

    • Hymn, stanza 1, line 29.
  • No war, or battle’s sound
    Was heard the world around.
    The idle spear and shield were high up hung.

    • Hymn, stanza 4, line 53.
  • Time will run back and fetch the Age of Gold.
    • Hymn, stanza 14, line 135.
  • Swinges the scaly horror of his folded tail.
    • Hymn, stanza 18, line 172.
  • The oracles are dumb,
    No voice or hideous hum
    Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving.
    Apollo from his shrine
    Can no more divine,
    With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.
    No nightly trance or breathed spell
    Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.

    • Hymn, stanza 19, line 173.
  • From haunted spring and dale
    Edged with poplar pale
    The parting genius is with sighing sent.

    • Hymn, stanza 20, line 184.
  • Peor and Baälim
    Forsake their temples dim.

    • Hymn. Line 197.

L’Allegro (1631)

  • Hence, loathèd Melancholy,
    Of Cerberus and blackest Midnight born,
    In Stygian cave forlorn,
    ‘Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy.

    • Line 1.
  • Haste thee, Nymph, and bring with thee
    Jest, and youthful jollity,
    Quips and cranks and wanton wiles,
    Nods and becks and wreathèd smiles.

    • Line 25.
  • Sport, that wrinkled Care derides,
    And Laughter, holding both his sides.
    Come, and trip it, as you go.
    On the light fantastic toe.

    • Line 31.
  • The mountain nymph, sweet Liberty.
    • Line 36.
  • Mirth, admit me of thy crew,
    To live with her, and live with thee,
    In unreprovèd pleasures free.

    • Line 38.
  • While the cock with lively din
    Scatters the rear of darkness thin,
    And to the stack, or the barn door,
    Stoutly struts his dames before,
    Oft list’ning how the hounds and horn
    Cheerly rouse the slumb’ring morn.

    • Line 49.
  • And every shepherd tells his tale
    Under the hawthorn in the dale.

    • Line 67.
  • Meadows trim, with daisies pied,
    Shallow brooks, and rivers wide;
    Towers and balements it sees
    Bosomed high in tufted trees,
    Where perhaps some beauty lies,
    The cynosure of neighboring eyes.

    • Line 75.
  • Herbs, and other country messes,
    Which the neat-handed Phillis dresses.

    • Line 85.
  • And the jocund rebecks sound
    To many a youth, and many a maid,
    Dancing in the checkered shade.
    And young and old come forth to play
    On a sunshine holiday.

    • Line 94.
  • Then to the spicy nut-brown ale.
    • Line 100.
  • Then lies him down the lubber fiend,
    And stretched out all the chimney’s length,
    Basks at the fire his hairy strength.

    • Line 110.
  • Towered cities please us then,
    And the busy hum of men.

    • Line 117.
  • Ladies, whose bright eyes
    Rain influence, and judge the prize.

    • Line 121.
  • And pomp, and feast, and revelry,
    With mask, and antique pageantry,
    Such sights as youthful poets dream
    On summer eves by haunted stream.
    Then to the well-trod stage anon,
    If Jonson’s learned sock be on,
    Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child,
    Warble his native wood-notes wild,
    And ever, against eating cares,
    Lap me in soft Lydian airs,
    Married to immortal verse
    Such as the meeting soul may pierce,
    In notes with many a winding bout
    Of linked sweetness long drawn out.

    • Line 127. Compare: “Wisdom married to immortal verse”, William Wordsworth, The Excursion, book vii.
  • Untwisting all the chains that tie
    The hidden soul of harmony.

    • Line 143.
  • Such strains as would have won the ear
    Of Pluto, to have quite set free
    His half-regained Eurydice.
    These delights, if thou canst give,
    Mirth, with thee, I mean to live.

    • Line 148.

Il Penseroso (1631)

  • Hence vain deluding Joys,
    The brood of Folly without father bred!

    • Line 1.
  • The gay motes that people the sunbeams.
    • Line 8.
  • And looks commercing with the skies,
    Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes.

    • Line 39.
  • Forget thyself to marble.
    • Line 42.
  • And join with thee, calm Peace and Quiet,
    Spare Fast, that oft with gods doth diet.

    • Line 45.
  • And add to these retired Leisure,
    That in trim gardens takes his pleasure.

    • Line 49.
  • Sweet bird, that shunn’st the noise of folly,
    Most musical, most melancholy!

    • Line 61.
  • I walk unseen
    On the dry smooth-shaven green,
    To behold the wandering moon,
    Riding near her highest noon,
    Like one that had been led astray
    Through the heav’n’s wide pathless way,
    And oft, as if her head she bowed,
    Stooping through a fleecy cloud.

    • Line 65.
  • Oft, on a plat of rising ground,
    I hear the far-off curfew sound
    Over some wide-watered shore,
    Swinging low with sullen roar.

    • Line 73.
  • Where glowing embers through the room
    Teach light to counterfeit a gloom,
    Far from all resort of mirth,
    Save the cricket on the hearth.

    • Line 79.
  • Sometime let gorgeous Tragedy
    In sceptred pall come sweeping by,
    Presenting Thebes, or Pelops’ line,
    Or the tale of Troy divine.

    • Line 97.
  • But, O sad Virgin, that thy power
    Might raise Musaeus from his bower,
    Or bid the soul of Orpheus sing
    Such notes as warbled to the string,
    Drew Iron tears down Pluto’s cheek,
    And made Hell grant what Love did seek.

    • Line 105.
  • Or call up him that left half told
    The story of Cambuscan bold.

    • Line 109.
  • Where more is meant than meets the ear.
    • Line 120.
  • When the gust hath blown his fill,
    Ending on the rustling leaves
    With minute drops from off the eaves.

    • Line 128.
  • Hide me from day’s garish eye,
    While the bee with honied thigh,
    That at her flowery work doth sing,
    And the waters murmuring
    With such consort as they keep,
    Entice the dewy-feathered sleep.

    • Line 141.
  • And storied windows richly dight,
    Casting a dim religious light.
    There let the pealing organ blow,
    To the full-voiced choir below,
    In service high, and anthems clear
    As may, with sweetness, through mine ear
    Dissolve me into ecstasies,
    And bring all heaven before mine eyes.

    • Line 159.
  • Till old experience do attain
    To something like prophetic strain.

    • Line 173.

Lycidas (1637)

  • Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more
    Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,
    I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,
    And with forced fingers rude
    Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.

    • Line 1.
  • He knew
    Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.

    • Line 10.
  • Without the meed of some melodious tear.
    • Line 14.
  • Under the opening eyelids of the morn,
    We drove afield; and both together heard
    What time the gray-fly winds her sultry horn,
    Batt’ning our flocks with the fresh dews of night.

    • Line 26.
  • But O the heavy change, now thou art gone,
    Now thou art gone and never must return!

    • Line 37.
  • The gadding vine.
    • Line 40.
  • Alas! what boots it with incessant care
    To tend the homely slighted shepherd’s trade,
    And strictly meditate the thankless Muse?
    Were it not better done as others use,
    To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
    Or with the tangles of Neaera’s hair?
    Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
    (That last infirmity of noble mind)
    To scorn delights, and live laborious days;
    But the fair guerdon when we hope to find,
    And think to burst out into sudden blaze,
    Comes the blind Fury with th’ abhorrèd shears,
    And slits the thin-spun life.

    • Line 64. Compare: “Erant quibus appetentior famæ videretur, quando etiam sapientibus cupido gloriae novissima exuitur” (Translated: “Some might consider him as too fond of fame, for the desire of glory clings even to the best of men longer than any other passion”), Tacitus, Historiae, iv. 6; said of Helvidius Priscus.
  • Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
    (That last infirmity of Noble mind)
    To scorn delights, and live laborious dayes.

    • Line 70.
  • Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil.
    • Line 78.
  • It was that fatal and perfidious bark,
    Built in th’ eclipse, and rigged with curses dark,
    That sunk so low that sacred head of thine.

    • Line 100.
  • Last came, and last did go,
    The Pilot of the Galilean lake;
    Two massy keys he bore of metals twain,
    (The golden opes, the iron shuts amain).

    • Line 108.
  • Blind mouths! That scarce themselves know how to hold
    A sheep-hook.

    • Line 119.
  • The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
    But, swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
    Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread:
    Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw
    Daily devours apace, and nothing said;
    But that two-handed engine at the door
    Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.

    • Line 123.
  • Throw hither all your quaint enamell’d eyes
    That on the green turf suck the honied showers,
    And purple all the ground with vernal flowers.
    Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,
    The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine,
    The white pink, and the pansy freakt with jet,
    The glowing violet,
    The musk-rose, and the well-attir’d woodbine,
    With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,
    And every flower that sad embroidery wears.

    • Line 139.
  • Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,
    Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide
    Visit’st the bottom of the monstrous world.

    • Line 156.
  • Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth.
    • Line 163.
  • For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead,
    Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor;
    So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed;
    And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
    And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore
    Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.
    So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high,
    Through the dear might of him that walked the waves.

    • Line 166.
  • He touch’d the tender stops of various quills,
    With eager thought warbling his Doric lay.

    • Line 188.
  • At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue:
    Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.

    • Line 192.

Tractate of Education (1644)

  • Litigious terms, fat contentions, and flowing fees.
  • I shall detain you no longer in the demonstration of what we should not do, but straight conduct ye to a hillside, where I will point ye out the right path of a virtuous and noble education; laborious indeed at the first ascent, but else so smooth, so green, so full of goodly prospect and melodious sounds on every side that the harp of Orpheus was not more charming.
  • Inflamed with the study of learning and the admiration of virtue; stirred up with high hopes of living to be brave men and worthy patriots, dear to God, and famous to all ages.
  • Ornate rhetoric thought out of the rule of Plato… To which poetry would be made subsequent, or indeed rather precedent, as being less subtle and fine, but more simple, sensuous, and passionate.
  • In those vernal seasons of the year, when the air is calm and pleasant, it were an injury and sullenness against Nature not to go out, and see her riches, and partake in her rejoicing with heaven and earth.
  • Attic tragedies of stateliest and most regal argument.

Paradise Lost (1667)

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.

Main article: Paradise Lost
  • And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer
    Before all Temples th’ upright heart and pure,
    Instruct me, for Thou know’st; Thou from the first
    Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
    Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
    And mad’st it pregnant: What in me is dark
    Illumine, what is low raise and support;
    That to the highth of this great Argument
    I may assert th’ Eternal Providence,
    And justifie the wayes of God to men.

    • i.17-26
  • The mind is its own place, and in itself
    Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.

    • i.254-255
  • To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
    Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.

    • i.262-263
  • They looking back, all th’ Eastern side beheld
    Of Paradise, so late thir happie seat,
    Wav’d over by that flaming Brand, the Gate
    With dreadful Faces throng’d and fierie Armes:
    Som natural tears they drop’d, but wip’d them soon;
    The World was all before them, where to choose
    Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:
    They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
    Through EDEN took thir solitarie way.

    • x.1532-40

Misattributed

  • Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.
    • Attributed to Milton at [1], [2], great-quotes.com, and brainyquote.com.
    • Spirituality author Sarah Ban Breathnach writes, in her 1996 Simple Abundance Journal of Gratitude: “Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life (is it abundant or is it lacking?) and the world (is it friendly or is it hostile?).” A Milton quotation occurs on the same page.

Quotes about Milton

  • It is as much commendation as a man can bear, to own him excellent; all beyond it is idolatry.
    • John Dryden, Translations from Theocritus, Lucretius, and Horace, “Preface”; in Sylvæ: or, The second part of Poetical Miscellanies, published by Mr. Dryden, third edition (London, 1702).
  • [A] puppy, once my pretty little man, now blear-eyed, or rather a blinding; having never had any mental vision, he has now lost his bodily sight; a silly coxcomb, fancying himself a beauty ; an unclean beast, with nothing more human about him than his guttering eyelids; the fittest doom for him would be to hang him on the highest gallows, and set his head on the Tower of London.
    • Claudius Salmasius, Ad Ioannem Miltonum Responsio, 1660, in Mark Pattison, Milton (1926)
  • An acrimonious and surly republican.
  • The want of human interest is always felt. Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master, and seek for companions.
  • John Milton was one whose natural parts might deservedly give him a place amongst the principal of our English Poets, having written two Heroick Poems and a Tragedy, namely Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Sampson Agonista. But his Fame is gone out like a Candle in a Snuff, and his Memory will always stink, which might have ever lived in honorable Repute, had not he been a notorious Traytor, and most impiously and villanously bely’d that blessed Martyr, King Charles the First.
  • The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he Wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.
  • “‘Better to rule in Hell, than serve in Heaven.’ Eh, little brother-killer?”
    “Suh-certainly, Lord Lucifer. Whatever you say, Lord Lucifer.”
    “We didn’t say it. Milton said it. And he was blind.”

  • Milton, perhaps to relieve the uniformity of English structure, which tends to become too barely evident in blank verse, tries often to imitate the classical order; but the result is an effect often of artificiality, at best of solemnity. Homer‘s Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεὰ, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος Οὐλομένην, and Virgil‘s ‘Arma virumque cano, Trojæ qui primus ab oris,’ &c., put the right words in the right place, without any loss of spirit. Milton’s opening—
       Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
    Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
    Brought death into the world, and all our woe, &c.
    is like an organ prelude: no English writer of a secular epic in blank verse could begin thus with success. It is impossible not to feel how tense must have been the struggle of that toil which Milton had to bestow on the stubborn material of his native language, before the gold of his words and verses won its full refinement. Diction so magnificent yet so severe cannot carry the reader along; so far from being the mere slave of the thought, like Homer’s Greek, it is itself a marvel of study and meditation, which arrests and amazes him.

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

John Milton (9 December 1608 – 8 November 1674) was an English poet, polemicist, man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell. He wrote at a time of religious flux and political upheaval, and is best known for his epic poem Paradise Lost (1667), written in blank verse.

Milton’s poetry and prose reflect deep personal convictions, a passion for freedom and self-determination, and the urgent issues and political turbulence of his day. Writing in English, Latin, Greek, and Italian, he achieved international renown within his lifetime, and his celebrated Areopagitica (1644)—written in condemnation of pre-publication censorship—is among history’s most influential and impassioned defences of free speech and freedom of the press.

William Hayley‘s 1796 biography called him the “greatest English author,”[1] and he remains generally regarded “as one of the preeminent writers in the English language,”[2] though critical reception has oscillated in the centuries since his death (often on account of his republicanism). Samuel Johnson praised Paradise Lost as “a poem which…with respect to design may claim the first place, and with respect to performance, the second, among the productions of the human mind,” though he (a Tory and recipient of royal patronage) described Milton’s politics as those of an “acrimonious and surly republican”.[3]

Because of his republicanism, Milton has been the subject of centuries of British partisanship.[4][when?][citation needed]

Contents

Poetry

Milton’s poetry was slow to see the light of day, at least under his name. His first published poem was On Shakespear (1630), anonymously included in the Second Folio edition of William Shakespeare. In the midst of the excitement attending the possibility of establishing a new English government, Milton collected his work in 1645 Poems. The anonymous edition of Comus was published in 1637, and the publication of Lycidas in 1638 in Justa Edouardo King Naufrago was signed J. M. Otherwise, the 1645 collection was the only poetry of his to see print, until Paradise Lost appeared in 1667.

Paradise Lost

Main article: Paradise Lost

Milton’s magnum opus, the blank-verse epic poem Paradise Lost, was composed by the blind and impoverished Milton from 1658 to 1664 (first edition) with small but significant revisions published in 1674 (second edition). As a blind poet, Milton dictated his verse to a series of aides in his employ. It has been argued that the poem reflects his personal despair at the failure of the Revolution, yet affirms an ultimate optimism in human potential. Some literary critics have argued that Milton encoded many references to his unyielding support for the “Good Old Cause“.[38]

On 27 April 1667,[39] Milton sold the publication rights to Paradise Lost to publisher Samuel Simmons for £5, equivalent to approximately £7,400 income in 2008,[40] with a further £5 to be paid if and when each print run of between 1,300 and 1,500 copies sold out.[41] The first run, a quarto edition priced at three shillings per copy, was published in August 1667 and sold out in eighteen months.[42]

Milton followed up Paradise Lost with its sequel, Paradise Regained, published alongside the tragedy Samson Agonistes, in 1671. Both these works also resonate with Milton’s post-Restoration political situation. Just before his death in 1674, Milton supervised a second edition of Paradise Lost, accompanied by an explanation of “why the poem rhymes not” and prefatory verses by Marvell. Milton republished his 1645 Poems in 1673, as well a collection of his letters and the Latin prolusions from his Cambridge days. A 1668 edition of Paradise Lost, reported to have been Milton’s personal copy, is now housed in the archives of the University of Western Ontario.

Views

An unfinished religious manifesto, De doctrina christiana, probably written by Milton, lays out many of his heterodox theological views, and was not discovered and published until 1823. Milton’s key beliefs were idiosyncratic, not those of an identifiable group or faction, and often they go well beyond the orthodoxy of the time. Their tone, however, stemmed from the Puritan emphasis on the centrality and inviolability of conscience.[43] He was his own man, but it is Areopagitica, where he was anticipated by Henry Robinson and others, that has lasted best of his prose works.

Philosophy

By the late 1650s, Milton was a proponent of monism or animist materialism, the notion that a single material substance which is “animate, self-active, and free” composes everything in the universe: from stones and trees and bodies to minds, souls, angels, and God.[44] Milton devised this position to avoid the mind-body dualism of Plato and Descartes as well as the mechanistic determinism of Hobbes. Milton’s monism is most notably reflected in Paradise Lost when he has angels eat (5.433–39)[clarification needed] and engage in sexual intercourse (8.622–29)[clarification needed] and the De Doctrina, where he denies the dual natures of man and argues for a theory of Creation ex Deo.

Political thought

Title page of John Milton’s 1644 edition of Areopagitica

Main article: John Milton’s politics

In his political writing, Milton addressed particular themes at different periods. The years 1641–42 were dedicated to church politics and the struggle against episcopacy. After his divorce writings, Areopagitica, and a gap, he wrote in 1649–54 in the aftermath of the execution of Charles I, and in polemic justification of the regicide and the existing Parliamentarian regime. Then in 1659–60 he foresaw the Restoration, and wrote to head it off.[45]

Milton’s own beliefs were in some cases both unpopular and dangerous, and this was true particularly to his commitment to republicanism. In coming centuries, Milton would be claimed as an early apostle of liberalism.[46] According to James Tully:

… with Locke as with Milton, republican and contraction conceptions of political freedom join hands in common opposition to the disengaged and passive subjection offered by absolutists such as Hobbes and Robert Filmer.[47]

A friend and ally in the pamphlet wars was Marchamont Nedham. Austin Woolrych considers that although they were quite close, there is “little real affinity, beyond a broad republicanism”, between their approaches.[48] Blair Worden remarks that both Milton and Nedham, with others such as Andrew Marvell and James Harrington, would have taken the problem with the Rump Parliament to be not the republic, but the fact that it was not a proper republic.[49] Woolrych speaks of “the gulf between Milton’s vision of the Commonwealth’s future and the reality”.[50] In the early version of his History of Britain, begun in 1649, Milton was already writing off the members of the Long Parliament as incorrigible.[51]

He praised Oliver Cromwell as the Protectorate was set up; though subsequently he had major reservations. When Cromwell seemed to be backsliding as a revolutionary, after a couple of years in power, Milton moved closer to the position of Sir Henry Vane, to whom he wrote a sonnet in 1652.[52][53] The group of disaffected republicans included, besides Vane, John Bradshaw, John Hutchinson, Edmund Ludlow, Henry Marten, Robert Overton, Edward Sexby and John Streater; but not Marvell, who remained with Cromwell’s party.[54] Milton had already commended Overton, along with Edmund Whalley and Bulstrode Whitelocke, in Defensio Secunda.[55] Nigel Smith writes that

… John Streater, and the form of republicanism he stood for, was a fulfilment of Milton’s most optimistic ideas of free speech and of public heroism […][56]

As Richard Cromwell fell from power, he envisaged a step towards a freer republic or “free commonwealth”, writing in the hope of this outcome in early 1660. Milton had argued for an awkward position, in the Ready and Easy Way, because he wanted to invoke the Good Old Cause and gain the support of the republicans, but without offering a democratic solution of any kind.[57] His proposal, backed by reference (amongst other reasons) to the oligarchical Dutch and Venetian constitutions, was for a council with perpetual membership. This attitude cut right across the grain of popular opinion of the time, which swung decisively behind the restoration of the Stuart monarchy that took place later in the year.[58] Milton, an associate of and advocate on behalf of the regicides, was silenced on political matters as Charles II returned.

Theology

Main article: John Milton’s religion

Like many Renaissance artists before him, Milton attempted to integrate Christian theology with classical modes. In his early poems, the poet narrator expresses a tension between vice and virtue, the latter invariably related to Protestantism. In Comus, Milton may make ironic use of the Caroline court masque by elevating notions of purity and virtue over the conventions of court revelry and superstition. In his later poems, Milton’s theological concerns become more explicit.

Milton embraced many heterodox Christian theological views. He rejected the Trinity, in the belief that the Son was subordinate to the Father, a position known as Arianism; and his sympathy or curiosity was probably engaged by Socinianism: in August 1650 he licensed for publication by William Dugard the Racovian Catechism, based on a non-trinitarian creed.[59][60] A source has interpreted him as broadly Protestant, if not always easy to locate in a more precise religious category.

In his 1641 treatise, Of Reformation, Milton expressed his dislike for Catholicism and episcopacy, presenting Rome as a modern Babylon, and bishops as Egyptian taskmasters. These analogies conform to Milton’s puritanical preference for Old Testament imagery. He knew at least four commentaries on Genesis: those of John Calvin, Paulus Fagius, David Pareus and Andreus Rivetus.[61]

Through the Interregnum, Milton often presents England, rescued from the trappings of a worldly monarchy, as an elect nation akin to the Old Testament Israel, and shows its leader, Oliver Cromwell, as a latter-day Moses. These views were bound up in Protestant views of the Millennium, which some sects, such as the Fifth Monarchists predicted would arrive in England. Milton, however, would later criticise the “worldly” millenarian views of these and others, and expressed orthodox ideas on the prophecy of the Four Empires.[62]

The Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 began a new phase in Milton’s work. In Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, Milton mourns the end of the godly Commonwealth. The Garden of Eden may allegorically reflect Milton’s view of England’s recent Fall from Grace, while Samson‘s blindness and captivity—mirroring Milton’s own lost sight—may be a metaphor for England’s blind acceptance of Charles II as king. Illustrated by Paradise Lost is mortalism, the belief that the soul lies dormant after the body dies.[63]

Despite the Restoration of the monarchy, Milton did not lose his personal faith; Samson shows how the loss of national salvation did not necessarily preclude the salvation of the individual, while Paradise Regained expresses Milton’s continuing belief in the promise of Christian salvation through Jesus Christ.

Though he may have maintained his personal faith in spite of the defeats suffered by his cause, the Dictionary of National Biography recounted how he had been alienated from the Church of England by Archbishop William Laud, and then moved similarly from the Dissenters by their denunciation of religious tolerance in England.

Milton had come to stand apart from all sects, though apparently finding the Quakers most congenial. He never went to any religious services in his later years. When a servant brought back accounts of sermons from nonconformist meetings, Milton became so sarcastic that the man at last gave up his place.

Religious toleration

Milton called in the Areopagitica for “the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties” (applied, however, only to the conflicting Protestant sects, and not to atheists, Jews, Muslims or Catholics[64]). “Milton argued for disestablishment as the only effective way of achieving broad toleration. Rather than force a man’s conscience, government should recognise the persuasive force of the gospel.”[65]

Divorce

Main article: Milton’s divorce tracts

Milton wrote The Doctrine & Discipline of Divorce in 1643, at the beginning of the English Civil War. In August of that year, he presented his thoughts to the Westminster Assembly of divines, which had been created by the Long Parliament to bring greater reform to the Church of England. The Assembly convened on 1 July against the will of King Charles I.

Milton’s thinking on divorce caused him considerable trouble with the authorities. An orthodox Presbyterian view of the time was that Milton’s views on divorce constituted a one-man heresy:

The fervently Presbyterian Edwards had included Milton’s divorce tracts in his list in Gangraena of heretical publications that threatened the religious and moral fabric of the nation; Milton responded by mocking him as “shallow Edwards” in the satirical sonnet “On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament”, usually dated to the latter half of 1646.[66]

Even here, though, his originality is qualified: Thomas Gataker had already identified “mutual solace” as a principal goal in marriage.[67] Milton abandoned his campaign to legitimise divorce after 1645, but he expressed support for polygamy in the De Doctrina Christiana, the theological treatise that provides the clearest evidence for his views.[68]

Milton wrote during a period when thoughts about divorce were anything but simplistic; rather, there was active debate among thought-leaders. However, Milton’s basic approval of divorce within strict parameters set by the biblical witness was typical of many influential Christian intellectuals, particularly the Westminster divines. Milton addressed the Assembly on the matter of divorce in August 1643,[69] at a moment when the Assembly was beginning to form its opinion on the matter. In the Doctrine & Discipline of Divorce, Milton argued that divorce was a private matter, not a legal or ecclesiastical one. Neither the Assembly nor Parliament condemned Milton or his ideas. In fact, when the Westminster Assembly wrote the Westminster Confession of Faith they allowed for divorce (‘Of Marriage and Divorce,’ Chapter 24, Section 5) in cases of infidelity or abandonment. Thus, the Christian community, at least within the ‘Puritan’ sub-set, approved of Milton’s views.

History

History was particularly important for the political class of the period, and Lewalski considers that Milton “more than most illustrates” a remark of Thomas Hobbes on the weight placed at the time on the classical Latin historical writers Tacitus, Livy, Sallust and Cicero, and their republican attitudes.[70] Milton himself wrote that “Worthy deeds are not often destitute of worthy relaters”, in Book II of his History of Britain. A sense of history mattered greatly to him:

The course of human history, the immediate impact of the civil disorders, and his own traumatic personal life, are all regarded by Milton as typical of the predicament he describes as “the misery that has bin since Adam”.[71]

Legacy and influence

Once Paradise Lost was published, Milton’s stature as epic poet was immediately recognised. He cast a formidable shadow over English poetry in the 18th and 19th centuries; he was often judged equal or superior to all other English poets, including Shakespeare. Very early on, though, he was championed by Whigs, and decried by Tories: with the regicide Edmund Ludlow he was claimed as an early Whig,[72] while the High Tory Anglican minister Luke Milbourne lumped Milton in with other “Agents of Darkness” such as John Knox, George Buchanan, Richard Baxter, Algernon Sidney and John Locke.[73]

Early reception of the poetry

John Dryden, an early enthusiast, in 1677 began the trend of describing Milton as the poet of the sublime.[74] Dryden’s The State of Innocence and the Fall of Man: an Opera (1677) is evidence of an immediate cultural influence. In 1695, Patrick Hume became the first editor of Paradise Lost, providing an extensive apparatus of annotation and commentary, particularly chasing down allusions.[75]

Title page of a 1752–1761 edition of “The Poetical Works of John Milton with Notes of Various Authors by Thomas Newton” printed by J. & R. Tonson in the Strand

In 1732, the classical scholar Richard Bentley offered a corrected version of Paradise Lost.[76] Bentley was considered presumptuous, and was attacked in the following year by Zachary Pearce. Christopher Ricks judges that, as critic, Bentley was both acute and wrong-headed, and “incorrigibly eccentric”; William Empson also finds Pearce to be more sympathetic to Bentley’s underlying line of thought than is warranted.[77][78]

There was an early, partial translation of Paradise Lost into German by Theodore Haak, and based on that a standard verse translation by Ernest Gottlieb von Berge. A subsequent prose translation by Johann Jakob Bodmer was very popular; it influenced Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. The German-language Milton tradition returned to England in the person of the artist Henry Fuseli.

Many enlightenment thinkers of the 18th century revered and commented on Milton’s poetry and non-poetical works. In addition to John Dryden, among them were Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, Thomas Newton, and Samuel Johnson. For example, in The Spectator,[79] Joseph Addison wrote extensive notes, annotations, and interpretations of certain passages of Paradise Lost. Jonathan Richardson, senior, and Jonathan Richardson, the younger, co-wrote a book of criticism.[80] In 1749, Thomas Newton published an extensive edition of Milton’s poetical works with annotations provided by himself, Dryden, Pope, Addison, the Richardsons (father and son) and others. Newton’s edition of Milton was a culmination of the honour bestowed upon Milton by early Enlightenment thinkers; it may also have been prompted by Richard Bentley’s infamous edition, described above. Samuel Johnson wrote numerous essays on Paradise Lost, and Milton was included in his Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779–1781).

Blake

Frontispiece to Milton a Poem

William Blake considered Milton the major English poet. Blake placed Edmund Spenser as Milton’s precursor, and saw himself as Milton’s poetical son.[81] In his Milton a Poem, Blake uses Milton as a character.

Romantic theory

Edmund Burke was a theorist of the sublime, and he regarded Milton’s description of Hell as exemplary of sublimity as an aesthetic concept. For Burke, it was to set alongside mountain-tops, a storm at sea, and infinity.[82] In The Beautiful and the Sublime, he wrote: “No person seems better to have understood the secret of heightening, or of setting terrible things, if I may use the expression, in their strongest light, by the force of a judicious obscurity than Milton.”[83]

The Romantic poets valued his exploration of blank verse, but for the most part rejected his religiosity. William Wordsworth began his sonnet “London, 1802” with “Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour”[84] and modelled The Prelude, his own blank verse epic, on Paradise Lost. John Keats found the yoke of Milton’s style uncongenial;[85] he exclaimed that “Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful or rather artist’s humour.”[86] Keats felt that Paradise Lost was a “beautiful and grand curiosity”, but his own unfinished attempt at epic poetry, Hyperion, was unsatisfactory to the author because, amongst other things, it had too many “Miltonic inversions”.[86] In The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar note that Mary Shelley‘s novel Frankenstein is, in the view of many critics, “one of the key ‘Romantic’ readings of Paradise Lost.”[87]

Later legacy

The Victorian age witnessed a continuation of Milton’s influence, George Eliot[88] and Thomas Hardy being particularly inspired by Milton’s poetry and biography. Hostile 20th-century criticism by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound did not reduce Milton’s stature.[89] F. R. Leavis, in The Common Pursuit, responded to the points made by Eliot, in particular the claim that “the study of Milton could be of no help: it was only a hindrance,” by arguing, “As if it were a matter of deciding not to study Milton! The problem, rather, was to escape from an influence that was so difficult to escape from because it was unrecognized, belonging, as it did, to the climate of the habitual and ‘natural’.”[90] Harold Bloom, in The Anxiety of Influence, wrote that “Milton is the central problem in any theory and history of poetic influence in English […]”.[91]

Milton’s Areopagitica is still cited as relevant to the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.[92] A quotation from Areopagitica—”A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life”—is displayed in many public libraries, including the New York Public Library.

The title of Philip Pullman‘s His Dark Materials trilogy is derived from a quotation, “His dark materials to create more worlds”, line 915 of Book II in Paradise Lost. Pullman was concerned to produce a version of Milton’s poem accessible to teenagers,[93] and has spoken of Milton as “our greatest public poet”.[94]

T. S. Eliot believed that “of no other poet is it so difficult to consider the poetry simply as poetry, without our theological and political dispositions… making unlawful entry”.[95]

Literary legacy

Milton’s use of blank verse, in addition to his stylistic innovations (such as grandiloquence of voice and vision, peculiar diction and phraseology) influenced later poets. At the time, poetic blank verse was considered distinct from its use in verse drama, and Paradise Lost was taken as a unique examplar.[96] Said Isaac Watts in 1734, “Mr. Milton is esteemed the parent and author of blank verse among us”.[97] “Miltonic verse” might be synonymous for a century with blank verse as poetry, a new poetic terrain independent from both the drama and the heroic couplet.

Lack of rhyme was sometimes taken as Milton’s defining innovation. He himself considered the rhymeless quality of Paradise Lost to be an extension of his own personal liberty:

This neglect then of Rhime … is to be esteem’d an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recover’d to heroic Poem from the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing.[98]

This pursuit of freedom was largely a reaction against conservative values entrenched within the rigid heroic couplet.[99] Within a dominant culture that stressed elegance and finish, he granted primacy to freedom, breadth and imaginative suggestiveness, eventually developed into the romantic vision of sublime terror. Reaction to Milton’s poetic worldview included, grudgingly, acknowledgement that of poet’s resemblance to classical writers (Greek and Roman poetry being unrhymed). Blank verse came to be a recognised medium for religious works and for translations of the classics. Unrhymed lyrics like Collins‘ Ode to Evening (in the meter of Milton’s translation of Horace‘s Ode to Pyrrha) were not uncommon after 1740.[100]

Statue of Milton in Temple of British Worthies, Stowe

A second aspect of Milton’s blank verse was the use of unconventional rhythm:

His blank-verse paragraph, and his audacious and victorious attempt to combine blank and rhymed verse with paragraphic effect in Lycidas, lay down indestructible models and patterns of English verse-rhythm, as distinguished from the narrower and more strait-laced forms of English metre.[101]

Before Milton, “the sense of regular rhythm … had been knocked into the English head so securely that it was part of their nature”.[102] The “Heroick measure”, according to Samuel Johnson, “is pure … when the accent rests upon every second syllable through the whole line  The repetition of this sound or percussion at equal times, is the most complete harmony of which a single verse is capable”,[103] Caesural pauses, most agreed, were best placed at the middle and the end of the line. In order to support this symmetry, lines were most often octo- or deca-syllabic, with no enjambed endings. To this schema Milton introduced modifications, which included hypermetrical syllables (trisyllabic feet), inversion or slighting of stresses, and the shifting of pauses to all parts of the line.[104] Milton deemed these features to be reflective of “the transcendental union of order and freedom”.[105] Admirers remained hesitant to adopt such departures from traditional metrical schemes: “The English … had been writing separate lines for so long that they could not rid themselves of the habit”.[106] Isaac Watts preferred his lines distinct from each other, as did Oliver Goldsmith, Henry Pemberton, and Scott of Amwell, whose general opinion it was that Milton’s frequent omission of the initial unaccented foot was “displeasing to a nice ear”.[107] It was not until the late 18th century that poets (beginning with Gray) began to appreciate “the composition of Milton’s harmony … how he loved to vary his pauses, his measures, and his feet, which gives that enchanting air of freedom and wilderness to his versification”.[108]

While neo-classical diction was as restrictive as its prosody, and narrow imagery paired with uniformity of sentence structure resulted in a small set of 800 nouns circumscribing the vocabulary of 90% of heroic couplets ever written up to the eighteenth century,[109] and tradition required that the same adjectives attach to the same nouns, followed by the same verbs, Milton’s pursuit of liberty extended into his vocabulary as well. It included many Latinate neologisms, as well as obsolete words already dropped from popular usage so completely that their meanings were no longer understood. In 1740, Francis Peck identified some examples of Milton’s “old” words (now popular).[110] The “Miltonian dialect” as it was called, was emulated by later poets; Pope used the diction of Paradise Lost in his Homer translation, while the lyric poetry of Gray and Collins was frequently criticised for their use of “obsolete words out of Spenser and Milton”.[111] The language of Thomson‘s finest poems (e.g. The Seasons, Castle of Indolence) was self-consciously modelled after the Miltonian dialect, with the same tone and sensibilities as Paradise Lost. Following to Milton, English poetry from Pope to John Keats exhibited a steadily increasing attention to the connotative, the imaginative and poetic, value of words.[112]

Works

Poetry and drama

Prose

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