English poet, controversialist, and Puritan republican whose epic Paradise Lost (1667) is, by most serious reckonings, the greatest long poem in English, and whose prose defences of regicide, divorce, and unlicensed printing make him one of the founding theorists of Anglo-American liberty. The son of a London scrivener who had been disowned by his Catholic family for turning Protestant, Milton was educated at St Paul's and Christ's College, Cambridge; he spent a self-directed five years reading everything at his father's house in Horton, travelled in Italy (meeting Galileo under house arrest), and returned to England in 1639 just as the country collapsed into civil war. For the next two decades, he put the epic aside and became a pamphleteer for the parliamentary and then the revolutionary cause.
The prose of the 1640s and 50s is as much his monument as the verse. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), published two weeks after Charles I's execution, argued that sovereignty rests with the people and that "any man whatsoever, if they have power," may hold a tyrant accountable — a position Milton then defended in Latin across Europe as official apologist for the Commonwealth (Defensio pro Populo Anglicano, 1651). Areopagitica (1644), addressed to Parliament against pre-publication licensing, is his most cited work — "As good almost kill a man as kill a good book" — and remains a foundational statement of free inquiry: truth and falsehood must be let "grapple" in open contest, because "who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?" The divorce tracts (1643–45) argued for divorce on grounds of incompatibility a full three centuries before the law caught up; they caused such scandal that they were a direct occasion for Areopagitica.
After the Restoration in 1660, Milton was briefly imprisoned, pardoned, and completely blind. Living in small houses in London and its outskirts, dictating every morning to daughters and assistants, he produced — in the last fourteen years of his life — Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. Paradise Lost is a poem about the Fall of Man that has been read, as long as it has been read, as also about the failure of the English Revolution: Satan is a tragic magnificent republican rebel, and the poem's final consolation — Adam and Eve leaving the garden "with wandring steps and slow / Through Eden" — is the voice of a man whose political cause has been defeated and whose inward hope is all that is left. William Blake read the poem a century and a quarter later and announced that Milton "was of the Devils party without knowing it," a reading that has coloured every serious response since.