John Milton
John Milton
John Milton (1608–1674) was an English poet and prose writer, the author of Paradise Lost, one of the major epic poems in the English language. Educated at St. Paul's School and Christ's College, Cambridge, he devoted his youth to study, writing early works such as “On the Morning of Christ's Nativity” and “Lycidas.” In the 1640s he turned to public prose, defending freedom of the press in Areopagitica (1644), and from 1649 served the Commonwealth as Secretary for Foreign Tongues. By 1652 he had lost his sight entirely, a trial he met in the sonnet ending “They also serve who only stand and wait.” Blind and in retirement after 1660, he dictated Paradise Lost (1667), an epic of the Fall written to “justify the ways of God to men,” followed by Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes (1671). His poetry shaped English verse and Christian imagination for centuries.
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The Epic Tradition: Homer to Longfellow
Homer's Iliad and Odyssey set the pattern for epic poetry in the West. In the Divine Comedy, Dante honors Homer as the foremost of the ancient poets and journeys toward the vision of God. Milton took up the epic form for a Christian theme in Paradise Lost, telling of the fall and the promise of redemption. Longfellow published an English translation of the Divine Comedy in 1867 and wrote long narrative poems such as Evangeline and The Song of Hiawatha.
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Christian Imagination in English Literature
Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Milton's Paradise Lost and Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress gave English literature enduring visions of virtue, temptation and salvation. Centuries later, C.S. Lewis wrote scholarly studies of Spenser and Milton and modeled The Pilgrim's Regress on Bunyan. His friend J.R.R. Tolkien, a devout Catholic, helped lead Lewis back to Christian faith, and both men expressed their beliefs through imaginative fiction in Middle-earth and Narnia.
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