John Milton Research Paper

John Milton was born in London where he received excellent education. He went to St. Paul’s in London and Christ’s College in Cambridge, where he prepared for a career in ministry because of his growing dissatisfaction with the Church of England. He lived at his father’s estate at Horton, near Windsor, where he followed his dream curriculum of science and the new discoveries, mathematics, Greek and Latin authors, music, the systematic research of world history, and many volumes of poetry. Although, Milton wrote poetry he was more into politics. When he came home from his journey in Italy political trouble was brewing. During this wild period, he wrote many pamphlets that he hoped would inspire debate, even while he served the Puritan regime.

His most notorious prose and writings were inspired by his first, failed marriage and earned him the nickname “the Divorcer”: that at the age of thirty-two he married the seventeen-year-old Mary Powell, who left him after six weeks. Without depth of conversation, he argued, men and women were not joined in a genuine marriage. God, he claimed, meant spouses to be spiritual helpmeets and partners in “civil fellowship.” He later reconciled with Mary and after her death he was married two more times. After Cromwell’s death in 1558, he soon became disillusioned with the Puritan regime, and in 1660 Charles II came back from his exile and put Milton in jail and fined him for his service to the Commonwealth. He was a passionate advocate of political liberty during the heady years of the English Civil War. (2742-2743). John Milton’s most famous works are the Lycidas and Paradise

Lycidas includes examples of total, yet glorious, nonsense that enhance the experience of reading the poem. Lycidas is indeed an unusual poem. It is a “monody” in which multiple voices speak; the flower catalogue seems, as do several other passages in the poem, an extravagant digression; the rhyme and meter are irregular. (Womack, Mark). Critics question the coherence of the poem. It does not cohere in any single system but it does in a multitude of overlapping patterning systems. A critic would think that this poem has many flaws because it does not have a single patterning system but that critic would not be smart enough to pick up on Milton’s pattern, that when a pattern has a loose end a new pattern picks it and sews itself to