Author of Paradise Lost, the summit of the English epic
An English poet and fighter of the Puritan revolution. After going completely blind, he completed by dictation the grandest epic in English, Paradise Lost — retelling the fall of Adam and Eve and the rebellion of Satan. His Satan, crying "better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven," is so magnificent as almost to eclipse God, and became the most famous and most contested rebel in the history of Western literature. He argued all his life for free speech and the republican ideal; his Areopagitica is still a classic defense of the right to expression.
After going wholly blind, Milton composed verses in his head each day and had them written down each morning. Line by line, words a blind man could not "see" piled up into Paradise Lost. His Satan is so charismatic that posterity still argues: was Milton writing the fall of the devil, or did he unknowingly write the tragic grandeur of the rebel?
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.