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"Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, … but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself."

As a young man, John Milton wrote a friend: "Do you ask what I am meditating? By the help of Heaven, an immortality of fame." Not many can actually achieve such a goal, but Milton did. Next to William Shakespeare, he is regarded by many as the greatest English poet and the author of the language's finest epic poem.

First forays

Describing his childhood, Milton wrote, "I was born in London, of a good family, my father a very honorable man"—a man who was disinherited by his Roman Catholic family because he converted to Protestantism. Like his father, Milton became a talented musician, with a "delicate tunable voice and great skill." By age 9, he was writing verse and polishing his Latin and Greek under private tutors, and by the time he left for Cambridge at age 17, he had also begun learning French, Italian, and Hebrew.

He was hardworking and successful: an early biographer said he "was a very hard scholar at the University, and performed all his exercises there with very good applause." But he was also contentious, and as a contemporary put it, Milton "was esteemed to be a virtuous and sober person, yet not to be ignorant of his own parts." He was called "the lady of Christ's" (he was a member of Christ's College, Cambridge)—a tribute to his good looks and sarcasm about his austere life, a life Milton later described as "aloof from vice, and approved by all the good."

Milton left the university in July 1632 with bachelor's and master's degrees. He settled down, with his aging parents, at the family estate in Horton. He now gave himself to attempt "things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme." Of his six years at Horton, he said, "On my father's estate I enjoyed an interval of uninterrupted leisure, which I devoted to the perusal of Greek and Latin authors." At Horton he wrote the poems "L'Allegro," "Il Penseroso," "Comus," "Lycidas," and some sonnets. Though he thought of them as preliminary exercises, they still rank high in English poetry.

In 1637, as he approached his thirtieth year, solitude and obscurity began to irk Milton, so he set out on a continental tour—Paris, Florence (where "I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner of the Inquisition"), Rome, and Naples. When he heard that civil war was brewing in England, he abandoned further travel: "I thought it disgraceful, while my fellow citizens fought for liberty at home, to be travelling for pleasure abroad."

Propagandist years

The poet settled in London, resumed his studies, and began to swim in "the troubled sea of noises and hoarse dispute" as a writer of pamphlets. His first pamphlet, published in 1641, was the opening volley of 20 years of political warfare. He attacked the corruptions of state and church while upholding the ideals of the Puritan party.

In the spring of 1642, the 33-year-old Milton married Mary Powell, the 17-year-old daughter of royalists. It was an unhappy marriage. Mary came from a large family and found Milton's quiet, bookish existence lonely. After a month, she returned to her family and remained there three years until she and her husband were reconciled.

His troubled marriage shocked Milton, and he set out to write The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, in which he argued that incompatibility—not just adultery—was grounds for divorce. The pamphlet was greeted by a storm of protest. When the government sought to prosecute him for having published without a license, Milton penned Areopagitica, which many consider the finest defense of freedom of the press ever written. "Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature," he wrote, "but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself."

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