John Milton
(1608-1674), PoetSitter associated with 72 portraits
Milton is regarded as one of the greatest English poets and a master of political pamphleteering. Forceful and idealistic, he served the Commonwealth as Latin Secretary but was arrested upon the restoration of Charles II. The tragic circumstances of his life – a difficult first marriage, the death of two wives, and his eventual blindness in 1652 – are reflected in the occasional melancholy of his work. Milton is best known for Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), an epic poem of Heaven, Hell, God, Satan, and angels: ‘Of things invisible to mortal sight’. Intense cultural interest in the nature of blindness meant that artists and writers continued to be fascinated by his experience of blindness in the Romantic and Victorian periods.
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Tom Cook
25 August 2019, 12:22
The current bio is quite good, but maybe needs a touch of revision, as well as its punctuation correcting. Milton’s first marriage seems not to have been wholly unhappy; his first and second wives both died before him; his work is not generally despairing (though his version of Satan is), with Paradise Lost in particular being a grand reconciliation to humanity’s shortcomings; and finally, though Paradise Regained is an epic, it’s not nearly as well known as Paradise Lost, while Samson Agonistes isn’t an epic at all, but rather a verse drama. Feel free to use the following version if you think it reads nicely:
Milton is regarded as one of the greatest English poets and a master of political pamphleteering. Forceful and idealistic, he served the Commonwealth as Latin Secretary but was arrested upon the restoration of Charles II. The tragic circumstances of his life – a difficult first marriage, the death of two wives, and his eventual blindness in 1652 – are reflected in the occasional melancholy of his work. Milton is best known for Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), an epic poem of Heaven, Hell, God, Satan, and angels: ‘Of things invisible to mortal sight’. Intense cultural interest in the nature of blindness meant that artists and writers continued to be fascinated by his experience of blindness in the Romantic and Victorian periods.