British · b. 1608
John Milton was an English poet and intellectual, author of Paradise Lost, the supreme epic poem in the English language.
John Milton was a poet, polemicist, and civil servant during the turbulent era of the English Civil War, an ardent defender of liberty whose prose works championed free speech and republican government.
His masterpiece, Paradise Lost (1667), composed after he had gone completely blind, retells the fall of man in blank verse of unmatched grandeur, giving English literature its greatest epic and one of its most compelling characters in Satan. He also wrote Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, and the landmark defense of free expression Areopagitica.
Milton stands second only to Shakespeare among English poets, his sublime epic a cornerstone of the literary canon.
by John Milton
The fall of Satan, the creation of the world, the temptation and fall of Adam and Eve — in twelve books of blank verse written by a blind man from memory and dictation. Milton's stated aim was to 'justify the ways of God to men', but the poem's Satan is so compelling that Blake argued Milton was 'of the Devil's party without knowing it'.
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