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Essay on The Biography of John Milton
John Milton (1608-1674) is considered by many to be the greatest English poet (excepting Shakespeare), John Milton gave voice to his deeply felt religious and intellectual convictions.
His richly textured and passionate verse honored the classics and would influence generations of English writers. His "Paradise Lost" (1667) is the consummate example of English epic poetry.
Milton's powerful; rhetoric prose and the eloquence of his poetry had an immense influence especially on the 18th-century verse. Besides poems, Milton published pamphlets defending civil and religious rights.
"Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe, with loss of Eden." (Extracted from Paradise Lost)
John Milton was born in London in 1608 at the height of the Protestant Reformation in England. His father was a law writer who had achieved some success by the time Milton was born. This prosperity afforded Milton an excellent education, first with private tutoring, then a private school, and finally Cambridge. Milton a studious boy, excelled in languages and classical studies.
Educated at St. Paul's School and Cambridge University, Milton aspired towards a career in the Anglican Church, but philosophical conflicts with Church doctrine and his own burgeoning interest in writing drove him from his intended profession. Steeping himself in the classics as well as more contemporary writings, Milton educated himself both at home and abroad and acquired a distinctly scholarly background and set of tools for his writing.
His grandfather was a Roman Catholic who had disowned Milton's father when the latter turned Protestant. From the beginning, Milton was an eager student (he tells us that from the time he was twelve, he seldom stopped reading before midnight), and he learned Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and began to try to write verse.
In 1625 he enrolled at Christ's College, Cambridge, clashed with his tutor the following year and was suspended...
