59 Fun Facts About John Milton

Genesis never names the forbidden fruit, but which fruit does Milton call it in Paradise Lost?

An apple: the poem names it twice, once when the fallen archangel boasts in Hell that he ruined mankind 'with an apple'. The idea is often traced to a Latin pun, since the words for evil and apple are spelled alike.

Paradise Lost is written in which metrical form?

Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter. A note added for puzzled readers explains 'why the poem rhymes not', and in it Milton dismisses rhyme as 'the invention of a barbarous age'.

The house in Bread Street where Milton was born was destroyed in which event?

The Great Fire of 1666 destroyed it the year before Paradise Lost went on sale. Milton still owned the house, and losing it cut his income.

Milton's father made his living in which profession?

Scrivener: he drew up wills and contracts and lent out money, a business that paid for his son's private tutors and long years of study. He was also a composer of some note.

Which London school did Milton attend before he went to Cambridge?

St Paul's School took him in at about the age of twelve, alongside lessons from private tutors at home. He studied so hard that he seldom went to bed before midnight.

Where at Cambridge did Milton study from 1625, sharing an alma mater with Charles Darwin?

Christ's College. Milton fell out with his tutor, William Chappell, left Cambridge for a time and came back under a different tutor.

John Aubrey wrote that Milton's fair complexion earned him what nickname from fellow Cambridge students?

The Lady. John Aubrey put the name down to Milton's fair skin, and Milton himself grumbled in a letter that he had found few kindred spirits among his fellow students.

Milton's first poem to appear in print was an epitaph on which writer?

Shakespeare. Milton's tribute ran unsigned among the poems at the front of the 1632 Second Folio, so his first appearance in print didn't carry his name.

Milton's twin poems L'Allegro and Il Penseroso celebrate which contrasting moods?

Mirth and melancholy. Each poem opens by ordering the other's mood away: L'Allegro begins 'Hence loathed Melancholy', and Il Penseroso answers 'Hence vain deluding joys'.

Milton wrote On the Morning of Christ's Nativity in December 1629, just after what milestone?

Turning 21. Milton came of age on 9 December 1629, and the ode he wrote that Christmas shows the pagan gods fleeing their shrines as the infant Christ arrives.

Milton's masque Comus was first performed in 1634 at which castle?

Ludlow. The masque welcomed the Earl of Bridgewater to the castle as Lord President of Wales, and his own children played the heroine and her two brothers.

In Milton's masque Comus, which virtue does the heroine defend when the sorcerer offers his enchanted cup?

Chastity. Held fast in an enchanted chair, she refuses the sorcerer's drink, yet her brothers' swords can't release her: it takes the river nymph Sabrina to break the spell.

Milton's pastoral elegy Lycidas mourns which Cambridge friend, drowned in the Irish Sea in 1637?

Edward King. His ship went down off the Welsh coast on the crossing from Chester to Ireland, and Milton used the elegy to attack what his headnote calls 'our corrupted clergy'.

Which poet's sonnet London, 1802 opens by wishing Milton were 'living at this hour'?

William Wordsworth. His sonnet calls England 'a fen of stagnant waters' and begs Milton to return and give it 'manners, virtue, freedom, power'.

On his 1638 tour of Italy, Milton visited which astronomer near Florence?

Galileo. Old and confined to his villa by the Inquisition, he received the young English traveller, who later wrote him and his telescope into Paradise Lost.

Milton cut his tour of Italy short, dropping plans for Sicily and Greece, after hearing what?

Civil war brewing in England. That was the reason Milton gave years later, yet he was in no hurry: he spent some seven more months returning through Rome, Florence, Venice and Geneva.

Milton's first wife, Mary Powell, came from a family near which city, the king's wartime headquarters?

Oxford. When the city fell to Parliament in 1646 the ruined Royalist Powells left Forest Hill for London, and Milton, a Parliament man, took his in-laws into his own house.

After his young wife left him, Milton wrote a series of pamphlets arguing for what?

Divorce on grounds of incompatibility. Marriage, he argued, is a meeting of minds, so a mismatch of minds should end it; one preacher told Parliament the book deserved to be burnt.

Areopagitica (1644) is Milton's famous attack on what?

Pre-publication censorship. Parliament's order of 1643 said no book could be printed without a licence, and Milton answered that one might 'as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book'.

Milton's Areopagitica is named after the Areopagus, a hill and ancient council in which city?

Athens. The title echoes a speech by the orator Isocrates about that council, and Milton's own 'speech' to Parliament was never spoken, only printed.

Which 1818 novel carries an epigraph from Milton's Paradise Lost on its title page?

Frankenstein. The lines are Adam's complaint to his Maker for moulding him from clay unasked, and the creature later finds a copy of the poem and reads it as a true history.

Which Milton tract, printed weeks after Charles I's execution, won him a government post?

The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. Its sharpest words were for the Presbyterians, who had made war on the king for years and then balked at putting him on trial.

In 1649 the Commonwealth set Milton to answer which royalist bestseller, sold as Charles I's own meditations?

Eikon Basilike. The 'royal image' went through about 35 editions in a year, though a bishop, John Gauden, probably had a hand in writing it; Milton called his reply Eikonoklastes, 'image-breaker'.

Which exiled royal backed Salmasius's defence of the executed king, which Milton's First Defence answered?

Charles II. Salmasius, a professor at Leiden, was one of Europe's most celebrated scholars, so the republic needed a champion; Milton's Latin reply made his own name across the Continent.

What official title did Milton hold under the Commonwealth from 1649 to 1660?

Secretary for Foreign Tongues. Diplomacy ran on Latin, so Milton put the republic's letters to foreign powers into it and translated the replies, and he was soon defending the regime in print as well.

Which line ends Milton's sonnet on 'how my light is spent'?

They also serve who only stand and wait. The speaker asks whether God demands a day's labour from a man denied light, and Patience replies that God needs no one's work: thousands already speed at his bidding.

Which fellow poet became Milton's assistant in government service in 1657 and later helped shield him from the restored monarchy?

Andrew Marvell. By 1660 he sat in the Commons, where Milton's nephew says he rallied 'a considerable party' for his old chief, and he later wrote the poem of praise that introduces the 1674 Paradise Lost.

Milton's 1652 sonnet hailing 'our chief of men' was addressed to whom?

Oliver Cromwell. The praise turns into a demand: 'peace hath her victories no less renowned than war', and Milton wants him to stop the state putting clergy on its payroll, a hope the Protector went on to disappoint.

What happened to Milton at the Restoration in 1660?

He hid, was arrested and briefly jailed. The hangman burnt his books while he lay low in a friend's house, yet the man who had defended the king's execution was left off the list of those to die, which puzzled people even then.

Which Milton pamphlet of 1660 urged England not to bring back the king?

The Ready and Easy Way. It came out in late February 1660 with the monarchy's return all but certain, and as hope drained away Milton answered with a longer, fiercer second edition in April.

To which Buckinghamshire village did Milton retreat during the Great Plague of 1665?

Chalfont St Giles. His Quaker friend Thomas Ellwood found him the cottage and read the finished Paradise Lost there; by Ellwood's account, his remark that it said nothing of paradise found set Milton on to Paradise Regained.

How much was Milton paid up front when he sold Paradise Lost to the printer Samuel Simmons in 1667?

£5. Another £5 was due each time an edition sold out, and the first, of about 1,300 copies, was gone in eighteen months, so the poem found its readers faster than the tiny fee suggests.

What changed in the 1674 Paradise Lost?

Ten books became twelve. By then John Dryden had asked the old republican's leave to turn the poem into an opera; Milton, the story goes, told him he might 'tag' the verses.

In Paradise Lost, what is the name of the capital the fallen angels build in Hell?

Pandæmonium. Milton coined the name to mean the place of 'all the demons', and his devils raise the palace in an hour from gold dug out of Hell's soil; English later kept the word for any uproar.

Milton states that his aim in Paradise Lost is to 'justify the ways of God to' whom?

Men. The promise closes the poem's opening prayer, in which Milton asks the Spirit, 'What in me is dark illumine, what is low raise and support', so that he can rise to 'the height of this great argument'.

How does the fallen archangel of Paradise Lost finish his boast 'Better to reign in Hell, than...'?

Serve in Heaven. The boast doesn't last: alone in Book 4 he groans 'Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell', and admits that on Hell's throne he is supreme only 'in misery'.

Which angel recounts the war in Heaven to Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost?

Raphael. God sends 'the sociable spirit' to warn the pair about their enemy, and he tells the story over a meal Eve has prepared, which the angel eats, Milton insists, with 'real hunger'.

In Paradise Lost, which angel shows Adam a vision of the future before leading him out of Eden?

Michael. He shows Adam what his act will bring, from the first murder to the Flood, then softens the exile with a promise: 'a paradise within thee, happier far'.

In Book 9 of Paradise Lost, the first letters of consecutive lines describing the serpent spell out what?

SATAN. The name runs down the left edge of five lines (9.510-14) in which the serpent works his way 'side-long' towards his prey, like a ship tacking into a river mouth: a slanting signature for a slanting approach.

Which poet wrote that Milton was 'of the Devil's party without knowing it'?

William Blake. His note in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell says Milton wrote 'in fetters' of angels and God and 'at liberty' of devils and Hell because he was 'a true poet': a jab at how much livelier the Hell scenes are.

Which Christian critic's A Preface to Paradise Lost argued against reading the poem's devil as a hero?

C. S. Lewis. The Narnia author blamed modern readers, not Milton, for disliking the poem's God, and William Empson wrote Milton's God to answer him, arguing that the poem is great because it makes God look bad.

Paradise Regained (1671) deals mainly with which biblical episode?

The temptation of Christ. Milton passes over the Cross and wins paradise back in the desert, and when told that readers thought the sequel much inferior to Paradise Lost he 'could not hear with patience any such thing'.

Which work of Milton's shared a 1671 volume with Paradise Regained?

Samson Agonistes. Readers have long heard the poet's own case in its hero, a fallen champion held captive and mocked by the enemies he once beat; one Victorian biographer called it 'scarcely concealed' autobiography.

Milton's 1671 drama, written to be read rather than staged, is modelled on which tradition?

Greek tragedy. Milton brings on a chorus 'after the Greek manner', fits the action inside 24 hours, and says the best judges will know Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, 'the three tragic poets unequalled yet by any'.

How was Milton twice widowed?

After childbirth. Mary Powell died soon after bearing their daughter Deborah, and Katherine Woodcock within four months of bearing a girl who died too; she is usually taken to be the 'late espoused saint' of his sonnet.

Milton's nephews Edward and John Phillips, whom he educated, were the sons of which relative?

His sister Anne. Her two young sons boarded with Milton as his first pupils after his return from Italy, and Edward repaid him with an early Life of his uncle, printed in 1694.

Milton was buried beside his father in which City of London church, now ringed by the Barbican estate?

St Giles-without-Cripplegate. He was laid in the chancel in November 1674, in what is now one of the City's few surviving medieval churches, though German bombs gutted it in the Second World War and it was rebuilt from old plans.

Milton's long-lost treatise on Christian doctrine departs from which core teaching?

The Trinity. The treatise, commonly held to be his, ranks the Son below the Father; the Latin manuscript lay about 150 years in the state paper office, parcelled up with his official letters, until it turned up in 1823.

Which hymn, often proposed as England's national anthem, began as verses in the preface to a Romantic epic titled Milton?

Jerusalem. The verses beginning 'And did those feet in ancient time' became a hymn during the First World War, when the Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges, put them in a patriotic anthology and asked Hubert Parry for a tune.

Which Tory critic praised Paradise Lost yet called Milton 'an acrimonious and surly republican'?

Samuel Johnson. For all his barbs he came to the family's aid: when Comus was staged to raise money for Milton's granddaughter, who kept a small chandler's shop in Shoreditch, the prologue was his.

Milton's sonnet 'When I consider how my light is spent' is popularly known by which title?

On His Blindness. The title isn't Milton's: the sonnet first appeared in his 1673 Poems under a bare number, and the familiar label was added by later editors.

Milton's private tutor, Thomas Young, was a Presbyterian from which country?

Scotland. Young went on to supply the 'TY' in Smectymnuus, the pen-name five Puritan ministers built from their initials in 1641, and his old pupil joined the pamphlet war on their side.

Which Dutch law philosopher and poet did Milton meet in Paris at the start of his continental tour?

Hugo Grotius. Jailed in his homeland, he had escaped in 1621 hidden in the chest that carried his books in and out; when Milton called on him he was Sweden's ambassador at the French court.

What was odd about how Milton's younger daughters read Hebrew, Latin and Italian aloud to him?

They understood none of it. His nephew Edward Phillips says the girls were drilled to pronounce the languages exactly without learning them, 'a trial of patience almost beyond endurance', until all three were sent out to learn embroidery.

Where did Milton finally get a monument in 1737?

Westminster Abbey. Some thirty years earlier its dean had struck Milton's name from another poet's epitaph as too detestable for a church wall, and the 1737 inscription says more about its donor, William Benson, than about the poet.

Which fantasy trilogy takes its title from a line in Book 2 of Paradise Lost?

His Dark Materials. In Milton the phrase means the raw stuff of Chaos, which God may yet use 'to create more worlds'; Philip Pullman's trilogy retells and inverts the poem, with its heroine Lyra as a new Eve.

Which Aldous Huxley novel takes its title from a Milton line about a captive biblical hero?

Eyeless in Gaza. The words are the hero's own, early in the drama: promised as Israel's deliverer, he tells us to look for that deliverer now and find him sightless 'at the mill with slaves'.

Milton's Second Defence (1654) savaged Alexander More over a royalist attack; what had Milton got wrong?

More wasn't its author. Peter du Moulin wrote it and his name stayed a secret; More had seen the book through the press, and Milton took the editor for the writer and tore into his morals.

Which classical scholar's 1732 'corrected' Paradise Lost was attacked as presumptuous?

Richard Bentley. He argued that a bungling scribe had let errors of wording and logic creep into the printed poem and 'emended' them away, and Alexander Pope pilloried him for it in the Dunciad.