No other English poet has been so closely involved in the events of his time as Milton. In Milton case there were two reasons for this. Much of his work as Latín Secretary to Cromwell consisted of writing pamphlets justifiying Government policy, and these pamphlets and the ones inspired by the exiled Royalists did not hesitate to stoop to the most scurrilous personal details- and Milton sought to counteract these attacks on himself by producing autobiographical evidence. The second reason is that Milton felt from an early age that was destined” to leave and therefore believed that posterity would wish to know as much as possible about him. In his pamphlet The Second Defence of the People of England, wich is in large part a defence of himself.

After Cambridge and Horton, Milton began a European tour. He visited Galileo in Fiesole, near Florence; Galileo is the only of Milton´s contemporanies to merit a mention in Paradise Lost. Milton cut short his tour because of the situation in England, but did not hurry unduly on his way home, and did not join the armies of the Parliament of his return, devoting himself instead to the education of his two nephews, the Phillips brothers. Indeed, when Prince Rupert´s cavaliers reached the outskirts of London late in 1642, Milton wrote and displayed on his door the sonnet Captain or colonel or knight in arms, not very courageusly begging that his house might be spared and was the poet Pindar´s when Alexander the Great captured Thebes in 355BC. In the event, the cavaliers were beaten back. The years 1642-3 mark the end of what might be called Milton´s first period, and the beginning of his second. His prolonged education was complete. Poetically, he had already written his early lyric poems: the Nativity Ode; the companion poems  L´Allegro (the happy man) and Il Penseroso (the serious man); the masque, Comus; the pastoral elegy, Lucydas; and a number of sonnets, among them autobiographical Twenty-Third Birthday sonnet.

Milton´s second period was one of the public office and political pamphleteering, with a few sonnets the only poetry. Then, with his blindness, came the third period of personal defeat and disillusion, but poetically the great days of his three long poems, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes.

To return to the beginining of Milton´s second period: in 1642 or 1643, Milton married Mary Powell, the daughter of a Royalist house with wich his father he had business dealings; indeed, despite Mary´s obvious physical attraction for Milton, this was primarily a marriage by arrangement, and was certainly no love match on her side. Mary speedily found the Puritan austerity and intellectual stature of her, and promptly returned home. The war made reclamation difficult. This marriage is important because of the events it set in train. Had it not been for his own bitter personal experience, Milton would not have sought so vehemently to justify divorce by reference to scripture in four pamphlets. These pamphlets were condemned by theologians in Milton´s own party, wich was already, in most strongly held principles were endangered- the right of individual interpretation of scripture and freedom of speech and writing- Milton in 1664 published Areopagitica  his noblest pamplet, inspired by his love of liberty and free of the usual personal scurrility. In 1649 Milton was made Latín Secretary to the Commonwealth with the official title of “ Secretary for the Foreign Tongues”; the revolutionary government used Latín as its language of diplomacy, and the learned Milton was a natural choice. His main tasks were to write pamphlets justifying Government policy, particularly the execution of the King; to defeat the champions of the courts of Europe, from Stockholm to Savoy, for the victories of the English New Model Army he had created had made Cromwell a man to be reckoned with in international relations. By 1652 Milton halost his sight completely, and in 1665 he was allowed a substitute Secretary. He now turned his mind back to poetry, though he continued to write anti-monarchical pamphlets until 1660, the year of the Restoration.
 

Milton´s third period, that of his long poems, coincides approximately with the first fourteen years of the restoration (1660-1674), though there are grounds for believing that he wrote Satan´s address to the sun as early as 1642. At the time of the Restoration, Milton as a well-known Cromwellian was in some physical danger, but the Royalist poet Davenant, placing poetry before politics, concealed him until the risk was past. Henceforward Milton, blind, ailing and impoverished, lived quietly and unpersecuted in the midst of his trimphant enemies until his death in 1674, visited by many friends and admirers. In this period he married for a third time; it is dificult to avoid concluding that his main reason was to ease the housekeeping problems of a blind man. His daughters were made to read to him in languages  they did not understand, and only the younguest Deborah, spoke kindly of him after his death, and that when his reputation as a great poet was already established; the children, on their side, sought to cheat him out of the marketing money and to sell his books. And yet Milton did not despise women. He thought the male partner should be predominant, but a woman like Eve has grace and dignity to match Adam´s male strength and intellect, and true wedded bliss such as we find in Paradise Lost, IV, comes from the perfect union of two different natures.

This divergence between precept and practice in his attitude to women is only one of the contradictions in Milton that make him so difficult to understand. A  fervent lover of liberty and individual freedom, he for some time allied himself with Presbyterians who condemned free will; and he certainly did not believe in the basic equality of all men, regarding himself as set apart and destined for greatness, the chosen prophet of the new dispensation under God intented Cromwellian England to teach the rest of Europe how to live. And his picture of Satan as the grand rebel against imposed authority, divine and benevolent though that authority may be, has caused the poets William Blake (1757-1827) and P.B.Shelley (1792-1822), to name but two, to maintain that Milton was of the Devil´s party without knowing it.

 ©York Notes . Paradise Lost .Books I-II and IV-IX. John Milton by Richard James Beck . Paradise Lost . Books I-II and IX-X  By R.E.C. Oxford University Press.