John Milton

<p>John Milton was born on December 9, 1608, in Cheapside, London. Educated at St Paul's School and Christ's College, Cambridge, he mastered Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Italian, composing brilliant early pastoral poems including <em>Lycidas</em> (1637) and <em>Comus</em>.</p><p>During the English Civil War, Milton dedicated his ferocious rhetorical intellect to the parliamentary cause. In 1644, he published <strong>Areopagitica</strong>, history's most celebrated and influential philosophical defense of freedom of speech and the press, passionately opposing state licensing and pre-publication censorship ('Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties'). Under Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth, Milton was appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues, drafting state Latin correspondence.</p><p>Having lost his eyesight completely by 1652, Milton survived the 1660 Restoration of the monarchy in political defeat and physical darkness. Undaunted, he dictated his monumental magnum opus, <strong>Paradise Lost</strong> (1667), composed in breathtaking unrhymed blank verse across twelve books, seeking 'to justify the ways of God to men' and creating literature's most complex tragic antagonist in Satan. He followed with <em>Paradise Regained</em> and the closet drama <em>Samson Agonistes</em> in 1671. Milton died peacefully on November 8, 1674, entombed in St Giles-without-Cripplegate, revered for centuries as the blind visionary of English epic poetry.</p>