John Milton (December 9, 1608 – November 8, 1674) was an English poet, most famous for his blank verse epic Paradise Lost.
His father, John Milton Sr., was a well-off scrivener, and his grandfather a wealthy landowner in Oxfordshire who, hewing to the old faith, had disinherited Milton's father after finding an English Bible in his possession.
Milton's father – who contributed a collection of madrigals in honor of Elizabeth I - encouraged his ambitions; he was writing poetry by the age of nine. "When he was young," Christopher, his younger brother, recalled to an early biographer after John's death, "he studied very hard and sat up very late, commonly till twelve or one o'clock at night." He was educated at St Paul's School, London, and at Christ's College, Cambridge (1625-32). While still at Cambridge he wrote some fine poems, among them the "Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity" and the octosyllabics L'Allegro and Il Penseroso. While at Cambridge he developed a reputation for poetic skill and general erudition, although due to his hair, which he wore long, and his general delicacy of manner, he was known as the "Lady of Christ's", an epithet perhaps applied with some degree of scorn.
In 1638 and 1639 he traveled on the continent, coming into contact with such men as Grotius, Galileo, and Lucas Holete, but was recalled by a rumor of the outbreak of the English Civil War.
His incessant labours cost him his eyesight, but he retained his office until the Restoration, after which those who collaborated with Cromwell were sought. As Cromwell's Secretary for Foreign Tongues and official propagandist (see Areopagitica), Milton was at the top of the list. He fled and went into hiding, but was caught and was arrested in October 1659. He would have been executed had not several influential people spoken on his behalf, including Andrew Marvell, his first assistant. Charles II decided to spare Milton, and he was released from prison on December 15.
Milton then lived in retirement, devoting himself once more to poetical work, and publishing Paradise Lost in 1667, the epic by which he attained universal fame (blind and impoverished he sold the copyright to this work on April 27th that year for £10), to be followed by the much inferior Paradise Regained, together with Samson Agonistes, a drama on the Greek model, in 1671.