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John Milton was born on 9 December 1608 in Bread Street, London, the son of John Milton, a scrivener and composer of church music, and his wife Sarah. He was educated at St Paul’s School and at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he took his BA in 1629 and his MA in 1632. At Cambridge he wrote “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (1629), his first major English poem.
After Cambridge Milton spent about six years reading at his father’s homes in Hammersmith and Horton. In these years he wrote “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” the masque Comus (performed at Ludlow Castle in 1634), and “Lycidas” (1637), an elegy for his drowned Cambridge friend Edward King. In 1638–39 he travelled in France and Italy, where he met Galileo and the poet’s patron Giovanni Battista Manso.
Back in England Milton turned to prose for twenty years, writing pamphlets against the bishops, for divorce, and for a free press in Areopagitica (1644). His Poems appeared in 1645. He married Mary Powell in 1642. After the execution of Charles I he defended the new republic and served Cromwell’s Council of State as Secretary for Foreign Tongues. By 1652 he was completely blind, and that year his wife died; his second wife, Katherine Woodcock, died in 1658.
At the Restoration in 1660 Milton was briefly arrested and his books burned, but he was released. Dictating to helpers, he completed Paradise Lost, published in ten books in 1667 and in twelve in 1674. Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes followed together in 1671. He married his third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, in 1663.
Milton died at his home in Bunhill Fields, London, on 8 November 1674, probably of gout, and was buried in St Giles Cripplegate. Wordsworth’s sonnet “London, 1802” opens with the line “Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour.”
The poem texts on Poetry Catalog follow public domain editions of Milton’s poems, so spelling and punctuation (such as “Colledge” and “’d” endings) may differ from modern editions. For the linked list of his poems on this site, visit John Milton Poems.