Essay, Biography or Paragraph on “John Milton” great author complete biography for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

John Milton

(1608 – 1674)

Milton is often considered the greatest English poet after Shakespeare. His rich, dense verse was a powerful influence on succeeding English poets, and whose prose was devoted to the defence of civil and religious liberty. Milton was born in London on December 9, 1608, and educated at Saint Paul’s School and Christ’s College,- University of Cambridge. From 1632 to 1638 he lived in his father’s country home in Horton, Buckinghamshire, preparing himself for his poetic career by entering upon an ambitious program of reading the Latin and Greek classics and ecclesiastical and political history. He settled in London and began writing a series of social, religious, and political tracts. In 1642 he married Mary Powell, who left him after a few weeks because of the incompatibility of their temperaments, but was reconciled to him in 1645. In 1649 he was appointed foreign secretary by the government of the Commonwealth. He became totally blind about 1652 and thereafter carried on his literary work helped by an assistant. With the Restoration, Milton was punished for his sup-port of Parliament by a fine and a short term of imprisonment. He married for the third time in 1663.

Milton’s career as a writer may be divided into three periods. The first, from 1625 to 1640, was the period of such early works as the poems written while he was still at Cambridge, the ode On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity (1629), the sonnet On Shakespeare (1630), L’Allegro and PenSeroso (both probably 1631), On Time (1632? ), At a Solemn Musick (1632-1633? ), The Masques Arcades (1632-1634 ? ) and Comus (1634), and the elegy Lycidas (1637) .His second period, from 1640 to 1660, was devoted chiefly to the writing of the prose tracts that established him as the ablest pamphleteer of his time. In the first group of pamphlets, Milton at-tacked the institution of bishops and argued in favor of extending the spirit of the English Reformation. The first published of this group was Of Reformation Touching Church. Discipline in England (1641); the one most deeply pondered and elaborately reasoned was The Reason of Church Government Urged Against Prelaty .(1641- 1642), which also contains an important digression in which Milton tells of his own early life, education, and ambitions. (Such auto-biographical digressions are found scattered throughout his prose works.)

John Milton’s work is marked by cosmic themes and lofty religious idealism; it reveals an astonishing breadth of learning and command of the Greek, Latin, and Hebrew classics. His blank verse is of remarkable variety and richness, so skilfully modulated and flexible that it has been compared to organ tones.