John Milton

John Milton was an English poet and civil servant, born in Cheapside, London, on 9 December 1608, and died on 8 November 1674. Educated at St Paul's School and Cambridge, he began as a poet of learning and ambition, writing short poems and a masque before turning to the public quarrels of his age. During the English Civil War and the Commonwealth he wrote pamphlets on church reform, divorce, free expression and the right to remove a king, and he served the government as a writer of official letters. His eyesight failed, and he was blind by the early 1650s. After the monarchy returned in 1660 he withdrew from public office and completed his greatest work, the epic Paradise Lost, followed by Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. Milton matters for the grandeur of his verse, his bold handling of the Bible's oldest stories, and his passionate defence of liberty of conscience, which still shapes arguments about free speech.