Introduction chapter one: life and creative career ofjohn austin

CONCLUSION
Milton had always wished to write an epic poem, and had often dallied with the idea of an Arthurian cycle; he had also long considered the idea of a work dealing with the Fall of Man. These two projects came together in “Paradise Lost”. This work is heavily indebted to the classical epics and is written in sonorous blank verse with a rich range of vocabulary and classical allusion.
This is an epic like no other because, besides telling the story of Adam and Eve, and the Fall of Man, it tells of the connection between human time and the infinite universe that exited before us. The character who connects the pre-human universe with our own universe is Satan. In fact, Satan is often considered the real hero of “Paradise Lost”.
Conspicuous above all his contemporaries as the representative poet of Puritanism, and, by almost equally general consent, distinctly the greatest of English poets except Shakespeare, stands John Milton. His life falls naturally into three periods:
1. Youth and preparation, 1608‐1639, when he wrote his shorter poems.
2. Public life, 1639‐1660, when he wrote, or at least published, in poetry, only a few sonnets.
3. Later years, 1660‐1674, of outer defeat, but of chief poetic achievement, the period of 'Paradise Lost,' 'Paradise Regained,' and 'Samson Agonistes.' Milton was born in London in December, 1608. His father was a prosperous scrivener, or lawyer of the humbler sort, and a Puritan, but broad‐ minded, and his children were brought up in the love of music, beauty, and learning. At the age of twelve the future poet was sent to St. Paul's School, and he tells us that from this time on his devotion to study seldom allowed him to leave his books earlier than midnight. At sixteen, in 1625, he entered Cambridge, where he remained during the seven years required for the M. A. degree, and where he was known as 'the lady of Christ's’ , perhaps for his beauty, of which all his life he continued proud, perhaps for his moral scrupulousness. Milton was never, however, a conventional prig, and a quarrel with a self‐important tutor led at one time to his informal suspension from the University. His nature, indeed, had many elements quite inconsistent with the usual vague popular conception of him. He was always not only inflexible in his devotion to principle, but‐partly, no doubt, from consciousness of his intellectual superiority‐haughty as well as reserved, self‐confident, and little respectful of opinions and feelings that clashed with his own. Nevertheless in his youth he had plenty of animal spirits and always for his friends warm human sympathies. To his college years belong two important poems. His Christmas hymn, the 'Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity,' shows the influence of his early poetical master, Spenser, and of contemporary pastoral poets, though it also contains some conceits‐truly poetic conceits, however, not exercises in intellectual cleverness like many of those of Donne and his followers. With whatever qualifications, it is certainly one of the great English lyrics, and its union of Renaissance sensuousness with grandeur of conception and sureness of expression foretell clearly enough at twenty the poet of “Paradise Lost.” The sonnet on his twenty‐third birthday, further, is known to almost every reader of poetry as the best short expression in literature of the dedication of one's life and powers to God. Milton had planned to enter the ministry, but the growing predominance of the High‐Church party made this impossible for him, and on leaving the University in 1632 he retired to the country estate which his parents now occupied at Horton, twenty miles west of London. Here, for nearly six years, amid surroundings which nourished his poet's love for Nature, he devoted his time chiefly to further mastery of the whole range of approved literature, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and English.