John Milton

John Milton was born in Bread Street, Cheapside, in 1608. His life is divided into three parts: youthful education and apprenticeship, foreign travels, prose and controversy and the last fourteen years of his life.
About his youthful education, this was the period that he wrote “Lycidas” (1637); period of prose and controversy (1640-60), when his major concern were political and social, producing most of his verse of spin off, public or private events ; and finally, his return to literature to publish “Paradise lost”(1667), “Paradise Regained” (1671), and “Samson Agonistes” (1671).
He studied at St. Paul's School, and mastered three idioms: Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Stayings with his writing and reading, he graduated at Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1629 and 1632. He read for six more years under his own direction, constantly. Everething important in English, Latin, Greek, and Italian; Milton read. He wrote in 1634, to a noble family in Shropshire, a masque known “Comus”.
In 1637, he contribuited for a elegy called “Lycidas”.
There are three major phases about his complex and troubled carrer that it is controversy.
He published against bishops that ruled churchs; responded to a book made by a German exiled in England; he published a defense in free press, “Areopagitica”, in response to the parliamentary ordinance to regulate printing;
In 1642, he married to Mary Powell, a daughter of a royalist country squire.
After few weeks, she left him. And from 1643 to 1645, he published about that divorce.
In 1645, his wife returned and they had three daughters, died in 1652. In 1656, John married again, and his new wife died in childbirth, in 1658. In 1663, Milton and his third wife: Elizabeth Minshull.
His life and though allowed him be in Renaissance Christian humanism; a small circle of great epic writers.


A selection of writings of 34 authors from the 5th ed. Of the 2-vol. Norton anthology
of English literature, c1986.