(December 9, 1608–November 8, 1674), was an English poet and political writer. His blank-verse epic, Paradise Lost, 1667, considered a masterpiece of English literature, detailed Lucifer’s revolt against God and the fall in the garden of Adam and Eve. Milton aggressively defended the Puritan cause, writing: Pro Populo Anglicano, 1651; The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649; The Tetrachordon, 1645; and The Reason of Church Government, 1642, which declared that governments should exert no control over the local churches.
In his middle forties, John Milton went blind, followed by his wife dying in childbirth. He continued creating by dictating his works to his daughters, including Paradise Lost, 1667, and Paradise Regained, 1671. He expressed:
There are no songs comparable to the songs of Zion; no orations equal to those of the prophets; and no politics like those which the Scriptures teach.244
In 1629, in the composition, On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, John Milton wrote:
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.245
In Il Penseroso, 1631, John Milton wrote:
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.246
In 1634, John Milton wrote in Comus:
That Power
Which erring men call chance.247
In Lycidas, 1637, Milton composed:
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).248
In his work, Animadversions upon the Reply of Smectymnuus, 1642, John Milton wrote:
Let us all go, every true protested Briton, throughout the three kingdoms, and render thanks, to God, the Father of light, and fountain of heavenly grace, and to His Son, Christ the Lord.249
In Tractate of Education, 1644, John Milton wrote:
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.250
In Areopagitica, 1644, considered the best of his prose works, John Milton wrote:
As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself.251
In On the Late Massacre in Piedmont, 1655, John Milton wrote:
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.252
In True Religion, Heresy, Schism, Toleration, 1673, John Milton declared:
No man or angel can know how God would be worshiped and served unless God reveal it: He hath revealed and taught it us in the Holy Scriptures by inspired ministers, and in the Gospel by His own Son, and His apostles, with strictest command to reject all other traditions or additions whatever.253
In Paradise Lost, written in 1667, John Milton coined the lines:
A heaven on earth.254
All hell broke loose.255
So vivid were his depictions in Paradise Lost, that it has become a classic which has endured the ages:
Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden. …
What in men is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That to the height of this great argument
I may assert eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men. …
The infernal serpent; he it was, whose guile,
Stirred up with envy and revenge, deceived
The mother of mankind. …
Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong flaming from th’ ethereal sky
With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy th’ Omnipotent to arms. …
Thus Belial with words clothed in reason’s garb
Counseled ignoble ease, and peaceful sloth,
Not peace.256