UNIT 18 MILTON: THE LIFE
Structure
18.0 Objectives
18.1 Introduction
18.2 An Account of Milton's Life
18.2.1 Childhood and University Life
18.2.2 Religion and Propaganda
18.2.3 Public and Political Life
18.2.4 The Restoration and its Impact
18.3 An Appraisal of Milton's Poetic Career
18.4 Let's Sum Up
18.5 Revision Questions
18.6 Additional Reading
18.0 OBJECTIVES
This unit aims to
e Offer a brief but coinprehensive view of the main features and circun~stancesof
Milton's life.
r Identi@ the various phases in his life when he wrote the different poems we will
study.
Suggest ways in which some of the main events of Milton's life ilnpiilge on his
work.
e Present an overview of Milton's poetic career that will bring out some of the
salient features of his work.
18.1 INTRODUCTION
The importance of exanlining a writer's life is someti~nesforgotten in the necessaly
insistence on close textual interpretation. We forget that such an interpretation can
often gain in richness from a knowledge of the writer's own life and times. This need
not necessarily be through directly correlating the writer's life and hisher works; it
may sin~plybe a matter of bearing in the back of one's mind the circuinstances and
events of the writer's life as a sort of backdrop to the oeuvre. Such a backdrop would
draw attention to some of the less easily evident significations of the oeuvre, and may
sometimes serve explanatorily as well. To this end, this unit will explore the
noi in en to us events in Milton's life as the personal and political stage on which his
anlbitions toward a poetic career were enacted. It will also glance briefly at solne
personal issues from his life in relation to his work, as for instance his marital
relations and his bliildness.
From your reading of the previous unit you would already have an idea of the
importance of the historical events that Milton was observer of and participant in.
What is of further significance is that Milton's personality was such that he could not
but be a key player in the events of his day. Even a cursory reading of the accounts of
his life is sufficient to confml that he was a passionate thinker, committed to the
causes he chose to espouse, yet never determined by them to the extent of beconling
rigid in his ideologies. His refusal to follow any single Protestant school, while
maintaining a lifelong commitment to Protestantism is clear indication also of his
individuality of thought and integrity of vision. We shall now examine some of these Milton : The Life
in greater detail.
118.2 AN ACCOUNT OF MILTON'S LIFE
18.2.1 Childhood and University Life
Milton was born in London on December 9,1608. When his father, John Milton Sr.
was disinherited by his Roman Catholic grandfather for turning Protestant, he moved
to London and established himself successfully as a notary and moneylender who
paid a great deal of attention to his son's education. Milton is supposed to have led a
rather pampered life at home. He studied at St. Paul's School, London, fiom some
time between 1615 and 1620 till 1625, when he joined Christ's College, Cambridge.
At St. Paul's, he followed the regular curriculum of Latin, Greek and I-Iebrew; but he
also learnt several modem languages fiom private tutors at home. Milton was known
to have been an h i d reader, to the extent that it probably caused the blindness of his
later years, and to have decided early ih his life that he would be a poet and a
humanist scholar. He went on to Cambridge and received his Bachelor of Arts degree
in March 1629 and subsequently his Master of Arts in July 1632. Here he was
nicknamed 'the Lady' for his fineness of features; he was by all accounts a handsome
youth who, by his own account, was throughout his younger days drawn to a life of
sensuality, but forswore it in the pursuit of the higher anlbition of becoming an epic
poet. The chaste Lady of the masque Conzus that he was soon to write, who r e h e s to
succumb to the temptations offered by Comus, appears to embody these sentiments to
some degree. There is sotnesuggestion of conflict with his tutor at Cambridge, and of
a degree of unpopularity which later gave way to respect and even reverence among
both, his peers and his professors, indicative of a proud nature that was not given to
bending to popular opinion.
His Cambridge years display little love for scholastic logic; he preferred and
celebrated instead the ideas and literatures of Renaissance humanism, blending a '
firmly rooted Christianity with Platonism. According to him he was first taken up by
the sensuality of Ovidian and other Roman poetry, but later took greater interest in
the idealism of Dante, Petrarch, and Edmund Spenser. This was to lead to a
fascination with Platonic philosopliy and finally to the mysticism of the biblical
'Book of Revelations'. During these years he also honed his p~eticcraft in Latin,
writing poetry that was highly sensuous in style. Two of his English poems survive
fiom this period: 'On the Death of a Fair Infant' and 'At a Vacation Exercise', both
witten in 1628. His first great poem in Endish, 'On the Moming of Christ's Nativity'
which we will shortly examine in detail, was written in the Clristrnas season of 1629-
30. It reflects the maturation to fullness of his poetical craft and,its innate tendencies,
its religious theme and its hold over fonn as well as meter anticipating the work of
his later days. 'L'Allegro' and 'I1 Penseroso' (both written in 163 11) though less
ambitious than the 'Nativity' poem atid more reflective, in a pastoral vein, continue to
reflect this mastery, as we shall see,
18.2.2 Religion and Propaganda
I On leaving Cambridge, it was assumed he would join the Chwcll, given his scholarly
and literary gifts; but he rejected this outright, staying by his intention to become a
I
poet and scholar and deprecating the tyranny of the Church. This raised the problem
of financial means, which he solved by staying with his parents, first at Hammersmith
and then at Horton, for six years until 1638. 'Ad Patrem' ('To Father'), is his
I expression simultaneously of gratitude to his father and a defense of the career he had
i chosen: During these six years, alongside writing Comus (1634) and Lycidas (1637),
he was to also study intensely the Greek and Latin writers and read extensively in
diverse disciplines like religion, politics, philosophy, geography, history, astronomy,
mathematics and music - a liberal scl~olarsl~ip that was unavailable to him in
Cambridge and that he was to later deploy even in his poetry with subtlety and
power. Comus was a masque that first dramatized his favoured theme of the grand
conflict between good and evil, while Lycidas, employing the form of the classical
pastoral elegy, may be seen as his first attempt to justify God's ways to 'men'.
Following his mother's death in 1637, a year later Milton travelled to Italy, winning
some recognition for his early Latin poetry. He also visited the imprisoned
astronomer Galileo Galilei, a meeting he considered significant enough to mention in
the Areopagilica. News of growing civil and political strife at home forced him to cut
short his tour and return liome the next year, to settle in London and work as a tutor.
Between 1641 and 1645, he was also to write various trenchantly argued tracts on
church reform, divorce and censorship that participated directly h d passionately in
tlie debates of the day. The picture that emerges by this time is that of a poet deeply
. engaged with and participating in the major issues of his day with a weighty
erudition. By 1660, the culmination of the civil wars in England, Milton had written
at least eighteen major prose works defending the Puritan rebellion and attacking its
enemies, including some supporting the regicide of Charles I. It was evidently a
period when he suspended his poetic ambitions in order to serve through his prose the
Puritan cause in the political upheavals of the time. The exceptions were the
versification of a few psalms and the writing of seventeen sonnets, ranging in subject
from the deeply personal to the political. All of Milton's prose works reflect a stern
and ardent concern with the protection of individual freedom of speech and dignity,
and condemned tyranny of any kind, whether by church or state. He repeatedly and
insistently demanded the separation of the separation of religion froin politics (in
terms that, it may be noted, have high relevance to our own current Indian context),
advocating a republicanism and an almost heretical view of the Bible that were higllly
controversial and brought both suspicion and notoriety. His Areopagitica, a speech
for the liberty of unlicensedprintzng, to theparliament of England (1644) is a classic
among his writings on these issues, as also his Doctrine anti Discipline of Divorce
(1643) and Of Education (1644), an almost typically Renaissance humanist text on
the ideal Christian education for young boys. The divorce tract was probably the
result of his own disastrous marriage to Mary Powell in 1642. Mary, half his age, was
the uneducated daughter of a11 Oxfordshire royalist squire who owed his father
money. The incompatibility was evident, and six weeks after the marriage Ma~ywent
back to her family, refusing to return to Milton. For Milton the marriage was
obviously a tragic mistake, and he argued in the Doctrine that the sole existing
justification for divorce - adultery - was perhaps a lesser evil than a fundamental
incompatibility that forced the maintenance of a loveless union. Mary and Milton
were reunited in 1645 by friends. He went on to take in the entire Powell family of
ten members for almost a year, when they were impoverished by tlie civil war. Before
Mary died in 1652, Milton had three daughters by her. What is o f consequence f i r us
is that this strange union led to a highly controvelsial tract that developed on Milton's
own personal crisis and presented it as a hndrlmnental social issue, fiarning it in tlle
discourse of the oppressive laws of the church. But in doing so, he also opened the
question of women's role in marriage, proposing an equality of relation and even the
(albeit theoretical) possibility of female superiority, even if he did not practise this in
his ow11family, in relation to either his wife or his daughters. These opinions throw a
great deal of usehl light on the figuring of Eve in Book IXof Paradise Lost.
I
18.2.3 Public and Political Life
By 1649, Milton had been invited by Cromwell to be a secretary for foreign
languages to the Council of State. Though it was not a policy making position but ,
I
rather a public relations one, in which he was expected to defend and support the
government, Milton accepted it, eager for a inore hands on participation in the
,I
politics of his time. As part of this task, he wrote liis first defence of regicide,
I
Ei@noklastes, in October 1649 and was to follow it wit11 several others. The success I
of these was tempered by the realisation of his failing eyesight, which turned to
colnplete blindness by the end of 1652, which was also the same year his wife Mary Milton : The Life :
i
died. Despite the blindness, he continued to write the political tracts of defence he
was employed to - several of them in Latin, addressing a European audience -
although his duties were substantially reduced. In 1656 he married Katherine
Woodcock and had a daughter by her, only to see them both die in 1658. He was also
at this time working on the important A Treatise on C/zristian Doctrine, finished
some time around 1659-60, that offers many of the theological arguments that were
to form the core of the debate in Paradise Lost. Like most Anglicans of that time,
Milton was raised in a Calvinist badition, and considered himself one for a very long
period. By the lime of the writing of Paradisc Lost however, he had begun to accept
the Al~niniandoctrine which asserted the salvation of all believers, unlike popular
Calvinism which pronounced the salvation ofjust a select few, and strove
continuously to reconcile this theologically to the idea of the freedom of the
individual to rational choice. The figuring of Satan in Paradise Lost is a brilliant
embodiment of the ideological tensions of this position. Toward the cnd of his life he
had renounced affiliations to all Christian sects, claiming a theological independence
that was quite radical for thc time.
18.2.4 The Restoration and After
The Restoration of 1660 was a deeply disillusioning mornent for Milton, although his
last political pamphlet written that year continued, very courageously, to argue for the
Conunonwealth f o m ~of government that he had so arduously supported, and
condemned the English people for being slavish. With the return of monarchy,
Milton's life was in danger, and he had to go into hiding for some months, The
passage of the Act of Oblivioll grarltillg clemency to the suppol-lers of the
Conunoilwealth eventually made it safe for hirn to emerge, but even then only with
the support and intervention of fiiends like the poet Andrew Marvel1 and the
playwright Willianl Davenant, and probably because his complele blindness
suggested he was now con~pletelyl~arrnlcsstoo. He lived the years froin then till his
death in straitened financial circumstances. From 1660 to 1665, Milton concenlrated
on further study with the aid of his third wife Elizabeth Munshell, whom he married
in 1663, and hisdaughters, who also took the dictation of his magnum opus, Par(~(list,
Lost. It was published finally in 1667, to be followed in 1671 by the publicalion of
Paradise Heg~iincdand S(~nuotiAgonisies, Milton did not survive long aftcr this, and
already severely ill, he died on 8 Noven~ber1674 of gout.
18.3 AN APPRAISAL OF MTLTON'S POETIC CAREER
Milton is considered by many lo be the ~ ~ l oimportant
st and influential poet in thc
English language after William Shakespeare. Hc was to have a lasling impact on the
work in particular of poets like William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley and William
Butler Yeats. From his early precocity in learning and interest in poetry it is evident
that he was not only gifted but aware of his gifls, and willing to hone them through
years of reading and writing. It is also clear that Milton's understanding of the poetic
vocation was, from t l ~ every beginning, an exalted one. He saw hinlself as the tlve
successor of Spenser, in that he wanted to ruse the classical heritage of the
Renaissance with the Christian spirit of the Refomlation, wbile remaining a
quintessentially English poet. It is in this sense that Milton is also a1 intensely self-
reflexive poet, whose poetry is suffused with the awareness of its own ainbition and
vocation. When we examine some of the shorter poems, this sense of self-awareness
in the poetry will becoine clearer, but for immediate reference for the student, it may
be worth looking at Milton's 'Lycidas', a poem in which the poet explicitly poses the
question of the worth of poetry and of the poetic vocation. The iinportant point to
note is that the answer for Milton was always a religious one, in the sense that he saw
his poetry as always at the service of Christianity, In this sense, poetry was a spiritual
vocation, divinely inspired by a religious muse and therefore in continuation with his
Studying Milton religious interests, rather than a means of self aggrandizement. However, it is also
clear that for Milton the religious was not divorced from the political. This political
sensibility manifested in several ways: in his intense conviction in religious
autonomy, in his belief that the only true rejoinder to classical literature and
philosophy would have to be an elaborate Christian one, and in the conconlitant need
to espouse contemporary Protestant English culture as tlie true Christian one. The
consequence was inevitably a strongly English-nationalistic sensibility which was
worked out in both humanist and Protestant-religious terms in his poetry.
In addition to tlie strongly political dimension of his poetic work, almost all of
Milton's poetry is sufhsed by a musicality that underscores his singular attention to
enhancing the poetics of the English language specifically. That is, the rhymes and
rhythms native to English are explored and exploited with lyrical skill in all his
poems, whether in the lighter mode of the shorter poems or in the inore weighty and
sonorous tones of Paradise Lost. The following lines fi-om 'L'Allegro7 illustrate this
point:
While the Cock with lively din,
Scatters the rear of darknes thin,
And to the stack, or the Barn dore,
Stoutly struts his Dames before,
Oft list'ning how the Hounds and horn,
Chearly rouse the slumbring morn,
From the side of som Hoar Hill,
Through the high wood echoing shrill. (11.49-56)
This ear for sound and the consequent enhancing of the musical potential of the
English language was one of the lasting legacies of Milton to succeeding poets, many
of whom remained envious of him in these abilities. The musicality of his poetry was
sometilnes conjoined with a striking sensuality of imagery, as in the following lines
from 'Lycidas' :
That on the green terf suck the honied showres,
And purple all the ground with vernal flowres.
Bring the rathe Primrose that forsaken dies.
The tufted Crow-toe, and pale Gessamine,
The white Pink, and the Pansie fi-eakt with jeat,
The glowing Violet.
The Musk-rose, and the well attir'd Woodbine.
With Cowslips wan that hang the pensive hed,
And every flower that sad embroidery wears:'
Bid Amaranthus all his beauty shed.. .. [ll. 140-91
What is interesting is that this was to grow into an important dimension of his poetry
especially after his blindness set in, and is especially in evidence in the early parts of
his epic Paradise Lost.
18.4 LET'S SUM UP
In this unit, we undertook to examine some of the key events and circumstances of
the life of John Milton, beginning with his childhood years and the years as a student
in Cambridge, in which he had an early inclination to a poetic career. We went on to
explore in some detail Milton's involvement in the political and religious *oil of
his age, focussing especially on the importance of religious politics to his public and
personal life. We noted how his poetic career was temporarily put on hold by his ,
involvement in the civil war and the twenty year Commonwealth reign. We explored
the impact of his blindness and his fall fiom political favour on his life, and the Milton : The Life ,I
subsequent return to his original vocation as a poet. We then had an overview of this
vocation and poetic career, examining Milton's chief achievements and contributions
as a poet. We shall now further elaborate on that overview, studying the matters that
came to be of concern to hiin in both his poetic and prose work, while also exploring
the factors that shaped them at the fonnal level.
18.5 REVISION QUESTIONS
1. Milton's life is largely a record of conflicts between diverse interests. Do you
agree'?
2. Through your readings here ancl in other sources, give an account of the
nature and extent of the influence of Puritanism in Milton's life, To what
extent is this enhanced or countennanded by his classical learning?
18.6 ADDITIONAL READING
Brown, Cedric C. john Millo,z: A Litemiy Life. New York: St. Martin's,
1995.
Campbell, Gordon. A Milt011 Cltro~zolog)~. New York: Macnlillan St.
Martin's, 1997.
Danielson, Dennis, ed. Tlze Cantbridge Companio~zto Milton. Cambridge,
England: Cambridge UP, 1989,
Grose, Christopher. Milton and the Sense of Tradition. New Haven: Yale UP,
1988.
Guillory, John. "Milton, Narcissism, Gender: On the Genealogy of Male
Self-Esteem." Critical E s s n ~ ~on s Johrt Milton, Edited by Christopher
Kendrick. New York: G.K. Hall, 1995, 165-193.
Hill, Christopher. Milton alzd llte Elzglislt Revolution. New York, 1977
Lewalski, Barbara K. The Lije ofJolzrz Milton. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.
Loewenstein, David. Representing Rcvoliition in Miltoll a~zd Eiis
Contumnporarics: Religion, Politics, und Polelnic~in Radical Puritnnism.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Low, Lisa Elaine and Anthony John I-Inrding eds. klilton, the Metnplzysiculs,
and Ronznnticisnz. Cambridge, Engltuld: Cambridge UP, 1994.
Miller, David. John Milton: Poetly. Boston: Twayile Pilblishers, 1978.
Orgel, Stephen and Jonathan Goldberg, eds. Tlic Oxfo~dAzithors John
Miltorz. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991.
Shawcross, John T. John Milton: Tlte SeCf'und tlic Worlrl. Lexington, KY:
University Press of Kentucky, 1993.
Spaeth, Sigrn~[Link]'s Knowledge of Music. Ann ARbor MI: Uiliversily
of Michigan Press, 1963.
Zagorin, Perez. Milton: Aristocrat & Rebel: The Poet and his Politics. New
York: D.S. Brewer, 1992.
