John Milton, born this week 400 years ago, was closely involved with the most exhilarating era of English history, but it wasn't until he'd lost his sight and been defeated politically that he wrote the poem for which he is most revered, writes Eileen Battersby
THE STORY BEGINS in celebration. Four hundred years have almost passed since a proud father, a moneylender, took his infant son to All Hallows Church, not far from his home in Bread Street in the city of London. The date was December 20th 1608. Mother was home in bed recovering from the birth. The baby was baptised John Milton. When he was born, Shakespeare was still alive; the boy would be not quite eight when the great playwright died in 1616, aged only 52. During Milton's boyhood, the Dean of Saint Paul's was none other than the flamboyant metaphysical poet and sermoniser, John Donne. Shaped by the Renaissance and the Reformation, John Milton, career poet, political player and propagandist, lived in strange, exciting times.
Plague twice raged through an ever-expanding, ramshackle post-Elizabethan London, as did the Great Fire, while the Puritan revolution created its own upheaval, featuring as it did the public beheading of a king and the dawning of a shortlived republic. Cromwell's rejection of the monarchy, which was supported by Milton, was followed by the Restoration, bringing obvious difficulties and a stint in the Tower of London for the by now completely blind poet. This politically spent force became the poet who dictated Paradise Lost (his enemies claimed his blindness was divine justice for his political views). It was he who had defended, in Latin, Protestant king-killing England before the eyes of a largely disapproving Catholic Europe.
Yes, these were exciting times, the most exhilarating period in English history. The epic grandeur of Milton's poetry, as soaring and as sonorous as the organ music of Bach, reflects this daring, as well as conveying the prevailing menace, the thrill of uncertainty and the ever-present tussle between good and evil, God versus that rather attractive alternative, Satan.
Equally, there is the elegiac aspect of Milton's eloquence which elevates Lycidas to high art. Should one query emotion in his verse, look to the heartbreaking pathos of the sonnets such as "When I consider how my light is spent,/ Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,/ And that one talent which is death to hide/ Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent/ To serve therewith my maker, and present . . ." (from Sonnet XVII). Or the magnificent memorial to Katherine Woodcock, his beloved second wife: "Methought I saw my late espouséd saint/ Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave/ . . . But O as to embrace me she inclined,/ I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night . . ." (from Sonnet XIX).
Music is important. Milton's father was a talented musician. John Milton lived in an age of great English music rich in the legacies of Thomas Tallis and William Byrd and, for all the vivid narrative force of his work, the dominant quality of Milton's language is its inherent musicality. The boy began his apprenticeship as a poet by immersing himself in Greek and Latin verse. His love of the classics prepared him well for his career at Cambridge, where he survived a spat with his tutor and a brief suspension. While a student, he produced an impressive body of Latin verse while also mastering Latin rhetoric, a skill which would prove useful in his subsequent political career.
On leaving university he devoted a further six years of study at his father's house to the task in hand - the making of a major poet, his good self. His highly individual and passionate lyrical pastoral voice - and make no mistake about it, Milton's poetry, for all the rhetoric, is passionate - reflects the combined influences of Homer, Virgil and Ovid as well as Dante. Yet it is most emphatically his own; he also looked to his native tradition, that of Chaucer, Spenser, Sidney and, of course, Shakespeare, whom he revered.
AS FOR THE epic form mastered so brilliantly by Milton in Paradise Lost, composed during the early 1660s, he could look even beyond Spenser's The Faerie Queene, beyond William Langland, and back to the Anglo-Saxon of Beowulf, the diction of The Seafarer and the themes of the less well-known ninth-century epic, Genesis B. This partly explains how Milton, for all his Latinate devices, is so compelling. He really is a consummate English poet, steeped in a literature which absorbed so much from Europe. Added to that is the way he combines the Christian with the pagan. Paradise Lost, a Protestant, Renaissance and English epic with shades of Jacobean tragedy, draws on the Bible as well as classical references. Above all, it is an adventure, a thriller.
Even though we know the outcome, who wouldn't wish to back Satan as the eventual winner? There is no disputing that Milton appears to have had far more pleasure creating the bad angels than he did fashioning the good ones. To read Paradise Lost - and many readers can't help chanting the lines aloud, as Milton inspires that kind of reading - is similar to reading The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien never concealed the fact that he drew on Milton's Lucifer when creating his fallen angel, Sauron. Paradise Lost is also a core text for Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy.
As a poet and career writer, Milton was driven; as a man he was ambitious, dry and remote, somewhat aloof. There are no funny stories, no obvious sense of humour - although while at university he did write a long mock-heroic poem, not all that funny, about the Gunpowder Plot. His wit lies in his work.
He had three wives, two of whom died. His first wife, Mary Powell, a mere girl, left him in 1642 after a month of married life to return to her parents, who were loyal royalists. She eventually came back to Milton after three years, only to die seven years and four babies later - in fact, three days after the birth of her third daughter. He never forgot that Mary's dowry remained unpaid.
Blind by the time he married for the second time, he lost that wife, the adored Katherine, and their child within 14 months. He was never close to his three daughters. There had also been a son, John, who had died as a baby.
In 1634 he began a collaboration with musician Henry Lawes, which resulted in Comus (or A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle). Taking virtue as its theme, it used the conventions of the court masque, the prevailing form of entertainment, and presented Milton with the chance to demonstrate a Spenserian and Shakespearean flourish.
By the summer of 1637 he was at work on his great pastoral Italianate elegy, Lycidas, which is believed to have been inspired by the death of Milton's Cambridge friend Edward King, who drowned in the Irish Sea.
Yet the theme, with its use of the Orpheus myth, goes beyond the death of one man; it is about the death of a poet. His loss is lamented, yet a sense of consolation emerges as poetry itself survives: "Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more./ For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,/ Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor: /So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed,/ And yet anon repairs his drooping head,/ And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore/Flames in the forehead of the morning sky."
Having completed his ode, "the uncouth swain", the poet in mourning, prepares to walk onwards: "At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue;/ Tomorrow to fresh fields and pastures new." All the lightness of touch which Milton could summon flows like water through this tremendous work (anyone wary of Milton should begin here and be seduced).
Several years before he had completed Lycidas, the young poet had already written L'Allegro (which was brilliantly put to music by Handel) and Il Penseroso, which act as a debate between lightness and melancholy: each poem reflects a contrasting mood. Their inspiration may well have been an academic exercise.
Shortly after completing Lycidas, Milton toured Italy. Its culture and art excited him and, having mixed in artistic and literary circles in Rome and Naples, he travelled to Florence, where he met the by then 75-year-old and almost completely blind Galileo. On Milton's return to England, he set up as a schoolmaster. But he was becoming increasingly drawn to public matters, such as the tension between parliament and the king and bishops.
From 1642, with the publication of The Reason of Church Government, and for the next 20 years, another Milton would surface, the political writer, whose fluency in Latin would make him a powerful force. The poet became silent, aside from some wonderful sonnets, as the pamphleteering took over. In 1643 he published The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, the first of four publications on the subject. His arguments made him unpopular. About this time, he noticed his sight failing.
AFTER THE EXECUTION of Charles 1, Milton was appointed Latin secretary to the newly formed council of state. His defence of the new government's policies caused outrage in Europe. Throughout his political career (during which he was a prolific writer of state papers in Latin), he lived in Westminster. Shortly before the Restoration he published The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, in a doomed bid to defend republicanism. But the royalist cause was resurgent.
Milton went into hiding, but was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower. Poet Andrew Marvell interceded on his behalf and Milton was released. Blind and now redundant as a political commentator, he married his third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, in 1663, and returned to poetry. It was quite a return. Paradise Lost, eventually extending to 12 books, was first published in 1667, assuring his literary immortality. Samson Agonistes, later made into an oratorio by Handel in 1743, and Paradise Regained were both published in 1671. Three years later Milton died and was buried beside his father in St Giles's Church, Cripplegate, which was bombed during the Blitz but is still standing, next to the modern Barbican Arts Centre built in the 1980s.
Revered by Blake and Wordsworth, Milton was described by Blake as "a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it" (evident from his treatment of Lucifer). Milton was denounced by TS Eliot, as he had been by Dr Johnson, who resented his use of "foreign words". Literary critic FR Leavis would make similar criticisms.
But genius prevails. Although he never achieved the universal appeal of Shakespeare - and who does? - Milton the inspired and inspiring epic poet lives on through a lyric, rhetorical language which creates vivid lasting word pictures: "Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon./ The world was all before them, where to choose/ Their place of rest, and Providence their guide./ They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,/ Through Eden took their solitary way" (Paradise Lost).
