II.

Life

Milton was born in London on December 9, 1608, and educated at St Paul's School and Christ's College, Cambridge University. He intended to become a clergyman in the Church of England, but his growing dissatisfaction with the state of the Anglican clergy, together with his own developing poetic interests, led him to abandon this path. From 1635 to 1637 he lived in his father's country home in Horton, Buckinghamshire, preparing himself for his poetic career by entering upon an ambitious programme of reading the Latin and Greek classics and ecclesiastical and political history. From 1637 to 1639 he toured France and Italy, where he met the leading literary figures of the day. On his return to England, he settled in London and began tutoring schoolboys and writing a series of social, religious, and political tracts.

In 1642 he married the 17-year-old Mary Powell, who left him after a few weeks because of the incompatibility of their temperaments, but was reconciled with him in 1645; she died in 1652. In his writings, Milton supported the parliamentary cause in the Civil War between Parliamentarians and Royalists, and in 1649 he was appointed Latin secretary to the Council of State by the government of the Commonwealth. He became totally blind in about 1652 and thereafter carried on his literary work helped by an assistant; with the aid also of the poet Andrew Marvell, he fulfilled his government duties until the restoration of Charles II in 1660. In 1656 he married his second wife, Katherine Woodcock, who died two years later, shortly after giving birth to a daughter who lived only a few months. With the Restoration, Milton was punished for his support of Parliament by a fine and a short term of imprisonment. He married for a third time in 1663, to his former nurse Elizabeth Minshull, and until his death on November 8, 1674, he lived with her in seclusion.

Of the poet's personality, memoirs written by Milton's contemporaries indicate that his was a singular blend of grace and sweetness and of force and severity amounting almost to harshness. In some of his own writing he reveals his arrogance and bitterness. Although isolated and embittered by blindness, he fulfilled the tasks he had set himself, lightening his dark days with music and conversation.