John Milton

John Milton was a Cambridge-educated poet who set aside verse for twenty years to write pamphlets for the Puritan cause, defending divorce, a free press in Areopagitica, and the execution of the king, and served as Latin secretary to Cromwell’s government. Blind by 1652 and in danger after the Restoration, he dictated Paradise Lost, the English epic of the fall, and followed it with Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. Johnson thought no one ever wished it longer; the lists assign it anyway, and Yale’s Directed Studies reads it as the summit of English Renaissance poetry.