English Literature · 2 books
John Milton was born on December 9, 1608, in Cheapside, London, the son of a prosperous scrivener and amateur composer also named John Milton. He died on November 8, 1674, in London. In between, he wrote what many readers and scholars across four centuries have considered the greatest long poem in the English language, and he wrote it while completely blind — dictating it to his daughters and to other amanuenses, revising by ear, sustaining across more than ten thousand lines of blank verse a structure of extraordinary intricacy and moral seriousness. Paradise Lost is the work, but understanding it requires understanding the life, because the poem is saturated with the experience of a man who gave his energies to a political cause that ultimately failed, lost his sight in the process, and then wrote, in defeat and darkness, an account of how it feels to have fallen.
He was educated at St. Paul’s School in London and then at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he received his BA in 1629 and his MA in 1632. He was a brilliant student, sometimes contentious with his tutors, and from early on both he and those around him recognized that he was being prepared for something of unusual ambition. After Cambridge he did not take up a profession immediately but spent about six years at his father’s house in Hammersmith and then Horton, reading extensively and writing. The poems he produced during this period — the twin companion pieces L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, the masque Comus performed in 1634, and the pastoral elegy Lycidas published in 1638 — showed a poet of fully formed technical mastery and genuine intellectual range.
He traveled to Italy in 1638–39, where he met scholars, scientists, and literary figures and where, according to his own later account, he also visited Galileo, then under house arrest by the Inquisition. The meeting, if it occurred, clearly affected him: the image of the blind astronomer appears in Paradise Lost, and Galileo is the only contemporary figure named in the poem.
The political upheaval of the 1640s drew him into the public sphere. He supported Parliament against King Charles I, wrote polemical prose in defense of religious freedom and against episcopal church governance, and after the execution of Charles I in 1649 wrote a justification of the act that brought him to the attention of the new Commonwealth government. He was appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues — essentially a senior official responsible for the Latin correspondence of the state — a post he held under Cromwell’s administration until the Restoration of 1660.
He went blind gradually and was completely blind by 1652. He continued his official duties with the help of assistants, including the poet Andrew Marvell. The visual theories he had developed — his understanding of light, optics, and the relationship between seeing and knowing — became, under the pressure of loss, the great subject of Paradise Lost. The invocations to the Muse that open Books I, III, VII, and IX of the poem each address the problem of writing in darkness, of seeking illumination that cannot be visual.
The Restoration ended his public career. He was briefly imprisoned, escaped the worst consequences that some of his former colleagues suffered, and retired to private life. It was in these years, the 1660s and early 1670s, that he dictated Paradise Lost, which was published in 1667 in ten books and in 1674 in a revised twelve-book edition. The poem takes as its subject the fall of Satan from Heaven and the subsequent fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden — events that Milton, working within a Christian theological framework, treats as the origin of the entire human condition. Satan is the most psychically realized figure in the poem: a being of tremendous capability who chooses, out of pride and wounded dignity, a course that he knows will destroy him. Milton gives him the most magnificent speeches in a poem full of magnificent speeches, and generations of readers have debated whether Satan is the secret hero of the work or merely the most vivid illustration of its central argument about the nature of evil.
He also wrote Paradise Regained, published in 1671, a shorter poem in four books dealing with Christ’s temptation in the wilderness, and Samson Agonistes, a verse drama published in the same volume, in which the blind and captive Samson reflects on his situation before his final act. Both works were written in the years of defeat and personal loss, and both reflect on the experience of waiting — in darkness, in captivity, in the aftermath of failure — for something that may or may not come.
He married three times. His first wife, Mary Powell, left him shortly after their marriage in 1642 and returned to her family; they eventually reconciled, and she died in 1652 following childbirth. His second wife, Katherine Woodcock, died in 1658, also following childbirth. His third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, survived him by many decades.
He died in London on November 8, 1674, probably of gout, and was buried in St. Giles Cripplegate. He was sixty-five years old.
Satan’s speeches in Paradise Lost — the defiant declarations of Books I and II, in which he argues that the mind is its own place and can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven — have been read as the poem’s genuine emotional center by generations of readers, beginning with the Romantics and continuing to the present. Blake’s famous remark that Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing it has shaped the poem’s critical reception more than any other single comment. The argument over whether Satan is the hero or the villain of Paradise Lost is, in effect, an argument about whether Milton succeeded in making evil genuinely comprehensible while also making it genuinely wrong. The fact that the argument is still alive and still being made with conviction on both sides is a measure of how much difficulty the poem builds into the question — and how seriously Milton took the claim that human beings have the capacity for both.
At Classics Retold, we have published Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained in new modern English translations designed to make Milton’s epic arguments genuinely available to contemporary readers. These are not abridgements or paraphrases — they are translations that honor Milton’s intellectual seriousness while removing the barrier of seventeenth-century diction and syntax that has kept many readers from the poem they deserve to encounter.
We’ve written more about his work and legacy here: He Was Europe’s Most-Read Writer — Then He Vanished.
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The Translation Landscape
Paradise Lost is not, strictly speaking, a translation problem — Milton wrote in English. But it is an accessibility problem of the first order. The poem’s seventeenth-century syntax, Latinate inversions, and twelve books of densely allusive blank verse have kept generations of readers at arm’s length. Several serious editors and scholars have addressed this. Here is how the main options compare.
Classics Retold Modern English Edition
Modern English prose adaptation • Kindle + Paperback
The only edition that renders the complete poem in fluent, unobstructed modern English prose. Every book, every episode, every speech — none of the allusive density removed, but the syntactic barriers stripped away. Intended for readers who want the full sweep of the narrative and the full weight of Milton’s argument without fighting the seventeenth-century grammar on every page. Annotations are folded into the text rather than pushed into footnotes.
Penguin Classics — edited by John Leonard
Original verse text with scholarly apparatus • Paperback + Kindle
The standard scholarly paperback. Leonard’s edition retains the original verse and adds concise, well-calibrated notes that illuminate classical allusions and theological references without overwhelming the poem. The introduction is lean and useful. If you intend to read Milton’s actual words and want reliable glossing, this is the first edition to consider. The edition does not modernize syntax; that work remains the reader’s.
Oxford World’s Classics — introduced by Philip Pullman
Original verse text • Paperback + Kindle
Pullman’s introduction is the main reason to choose this edition over others. He wrote His Dark Materials in sustained conversation with Milton — Satan’s arc, free will, the nature of authority — and his introduction brings that literary relationship into view with unusual clarity. The text itself is the Orgel-Goldberg Oxford Authors version; the notes are good. Particularly useful for readers approaching the poem through Pullman’s fiction, or interested in how twentieth-century literature absorbed Milton.
Modern Library Classics — edited by Kerrigan, Rumrich & Fallon
Original verse text with updated scholarship • Paperback + Kindle
Extracted from the Modern Library’s complete Milton, this standalone edition reflects current scholarship and makes a strong case for being the most academically thorough single-volume option. The annotation of classical allusions is particularly thorough, and the introduction is substantial. Best suited to readers who want Milton’s text held up against the full breadth of his intellectual context — classical epic, Protestant theology, political history — rather than simply glossed for narrative clarity.
