John Milton

John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought is a 2008 biography of the great seventeenth-century English poet by British academics Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns. Relying closely on documentary evidence and the authors’ deep knowledge of the historical era, John Milton traces the poet’s life through the development of his poetic, political, and religious ideas. Corns and Campbell, both world-renowned experts on Milton and the editors of the Oxford edition of the poet’s work, suggest a correction to the traditional view of Milton’s religious trajectory, arguing that his background was less Puritanical than has generally been thought.

Considering Milton’s early life, Campbell and Corns address a conundrum of Milton scholarship. Academics have generally argued that the radical Puritanism of Milton’s later work—poetic, political, and theological—ultimately derives from a Puritan upbringing. Most biographers have painted Milton as a heroically unswerving Puritan. However, it has also widely been acknowledged that much of Milton’s earlier poetry is not especially Puritan in character: indeed, it betrays a fondness for hierarchy and ritual typical of the Puritans’ archenemies, the conservative High Church Anglicans.

Campbell and Corns resolve this contradiction by adducing evidence to show that Milton grew up in a much more religiously conservative household than was previously thought. They demonstrate that Milton’s father (also John Milton) was a churchwarden at a High Church chapel in Hammersmith. They also show that he was a financial adviser to the King’s Men, the theatre company founded by William Shakespeare. This suggests a less-than-Puritan outlook, as the Puritans were doggedly opposed to the mere existence of theater (and were occasionally satirized in Shakespeare’s plays). In passing, Campbell and Corns suggest that John Milton senior may even be the author of an anonymous commendatory poem published in the front matter to Shakespeare’s First Folio. In any case, Milton’s father’s connection to the King’s Men helps to explain how his son, an unpublished young poet, was invited to contribute a commendatory poem to the Second Folio.



Having established that Milton’s childhood did not expose him to Puritan thought, the authors trace the “stages of radicalization” by which Milton became everything the conservative High Church Anglicans feared: a republican and an advocate of regicide who wrote tracts in support of permitting divorce, encouraging religious tolerance, and collapsing hierarchical power into more democratic structures.

They locate the pivotal moment in 1637, early in the poet’s career and the year Milton’s mother Sarah died (a High Church archdeacon complained that her tombstone had been laid the wrong way). That year, three radical Puritan preachers were horrifically punished for their diatribes against the established Church. All three men had their ears cut off; one, William Prynne, also had his nose slit open and his cheeks branded. Campbell and Corns demonstrate that Milton was aware of this event and suggest that he may even have witnessed it. His poem “Lycidas,” composed during that year, contains sharp invective against the established clergy.

From here, the authors trace the deepening radicalism of Milton’s thought, through the outbreak of the English Civil War, and Milton’s appointment to a senior position in the civil service of the republican Commonwealth. As “Secretary for Foreign Tongues” Milton published several defenses of the English commonwealth, the regicide of Charles I and the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell.



The authors stress Milton’s courage during the Restoration of the English monarchy. Now blind, and closely associated with the Commonwealth, Milton might have been wise to keep a low profile as the return of the monarchy loomed. Instead, he published several passionate tracts in defense of republicanism. When Charles II took the throne, Milton was imprisoned and was only released through the advocacy of friends, including his protégé, the poet Andrew Marvell.

At the same time, Milton was hard at work on his masterpiece, Paradise Lost. Campbell and Corns set out the ongoing debate about the poem. Despite the fact that it was begun before the Restoration (at around the time of Cromwell’s death), Paradise Lost reads to many commentators like an attack on republicanism and radicalism, since its principal rebel figure is Satan. Nevertheless, many scholars have argued that the poem is a subtle and complex defense of political liberty.

Campbell and Corns overturn the traditional narrative of Milton’s death. Most scholars have proposed that the poet died of kidney failure. However, the authors point out that chronic kidney disease would have entailed a long, slow death. Contemporary accounts of Milton’s death make no mention of a deathbed, despite the prominence of deathbed scenes in seventeenth-century biographers. They conclude that Milton must have died suddenly, perhaps of a gastrointestinal hemorrhage.



Throughout their biography, the authors stress Milton’s courage in the face of adversity: “This is a hero's life, though his heroism is of a rare kind. . . What he achieved in the face of crippling adversity, blindness, bereavement, political eclipse, remains wondrous.” Considered the standard biography by contemporary academics, John Milton was well received by critics: "illuminating" (Times Literary Supplement); "seamlessly written (Publishers Weekly); "a book of permanent value" (Literary Review).