John Milton (1608-1674) was an English poet, prose polemicist and civil servant for the Commonwealth of England. Most famed for his epic poem Paradise Lost, Milton is celebrated as well for his treatise condemning censorship, Areopagitica. John Milton matriculated at Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1625 and, in preparation for becoming an Anglican priest, stayed on to obtain his Master of Arts degree in 1632. While at Cambridge he wrote a number of his well-known shorter English poems, among them Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity, his Epitaph on the Admirable Dramatick Poet, W. Shakespeare, his first poem to appear in print, L'Allegro and Il Penseroso. Upon receiving his MA in 1632, Milton retired to his father's country homes at Hammersmith and Horton and undertook six years of self-directed private study by reading both ancient and modern works of theology, philosophy, history, politics, literature and science, in preparation for his prospective poetical career. Milton continued to write poetry during this period of study: his masques Arcades and Comus were composed for noble patrons, and he contributed his pastoral elegy Lycidas to a memorial collection for one of his Cambridge classmates in 1638.
As a young student, John Milton (1608-1674) dreamed of bringing the poetic elocution of Homer and Virgil to the English language. Milton realized this dream with his graceful, sonorous Paradise Lost, now considered the most influential epic poem in English literature. In sublime poetry of extraordinary beauty, Paradise Lost has inspired generations of artists and their works, ranging from the Romantic poets to the books of J. R. R. Tolkien.
