John Milton Trivia
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59 free John Milton trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This John Milton trivia quiz covers the whole life of England's great republican poet, not just his epic. The easy questions handle what most readers know: the subject and verse form of Paradise Lost, Satan's most famous line, Areopagitica, the blindness sonnet. Medium questions cover the early poems (the Nativity ode, L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, Comus at Ludlow, Lycidas), the Italian journey and Galileo, the teenage bride and the divorce tracts, and Milton's decade as Cromwell's Secretary for Foreign Tongues. The harder end is for English students and pub-quiz specialists: Salmasius and Eikon Basilike, the Ready and Easy Way, the five pounds Milton got for Paradise Lost, the ten books that became twelve, the SATAN acrostic, Blake, Johnson, C. S. Lewis and Empson, De Doctrina Christiana, and where he is buried. We keep Paradise Lost itself to a dozen questions here; our separate Paradise Lost quiz goes book by book. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on Milton and his individual works, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Fans should also try our English literature, English Civil War and poetry quizzes.
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Q 01Genesis never names the forbidden fruit, but which fruit does Milton call it in Paradise Lost?
An apple
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.
Q 02Paradise Lost is written in which metrical form?
Blank verse
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'.
Q 03The house in Bread Street where Milton was born was destroyed in which event?
The Great Fire
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.
Q 04Milton's father made his living in which profession?
Scrivener
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.
Q 05Which London school did Milton attend before he went to Cambridge?
St Paul's School
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.
Q 06Where at Cambridge did Milton study from 1625, sharing an alma mater with Charles Darwin?
Christ's College
Christ's College. Milton fell out with his tutor, William Chappell, left Cambridge for a time and came back under a different tutor.
Q 07John Aubrey wrote that Milton's fair complexion earned him what nickname from fellow Cambridge students?
The Lady
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.
Q 08Milton's first poem to appear in print was an epitaph on which writer?
Shakespeare
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.
Q 09Milton's twin poems L'Allegro and Il Penseroso celebrate which contrasting moods?
Mirth and melancholy
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'.
Q 10Milton wrote On the Morning of Christ's Nativity in December 1629, just after what milestone?
Turning 21
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.
Q 11Milton's masque Comus was first performed in 1634 at which castle?
Ludlow
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.
Q 12In Milton's masque Comus, which virtue does the heroine defend when the sorcerer offers his enchanted cup?
Chastity
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.
Q 13Milton's pastoral elegy Lycidas mourns which Cambridge friend, drowned in the Irish Sea in 1637?
Edward King
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'.
Q 21Which 1818 novel carries an epigraph from Milton's Paradise Lost on its title page?
Frankenstein
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.
Q 22Which Milton tract, printed weeks after Charles I's execution, won him a government post?
The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates
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.
Q 23In 1649 the Commonwealth set Milton to answer which royalist bestseller, sold as Charles I's own meditations?
Q 14Which poet's sonnet London, 1802 opens by wishing Milton were 'living at this hour'?
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth. His sonnet calls England 'a fen of stagnant waters' and begs Milton to return and give it 'manners, virtue, freedom, power'.
Q 15On his 1638 tour of Italy, Milton visited which astronomer near Florence?
Galileo
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.
Q 16Milton cut his tour of Italy short, dropping plans for Sicily and Greece, after hearing what?
Civil war brewing in England
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.
Q 17Milton's first wife, Mary Powell, came from a family near which city, the king's wartime headquarters?
Oxford
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.
Q 18After his young wife left him, Milton wrote a series of pamphlets arguing for what?
Divorce on grounds of incompatibility
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.
Q 19Areopagitica (1644) is Milton's famous attack on what?
Pre-publication censorship
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'.
Q 20Milton's Areopagitica is named after the Areopagus, a hill and ancient council in which city?
Athens
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.
Eikon Basilike
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'.
Q 24Which exiled royal backed Salmasius's defence of the executed king, which Milton's First Defence answered?
Charles II
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.
Q 25What official title did Milton hold under the Commonwealth from 1649 to 1660?
Secretary for Foreign Tongues
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.
Q 26Which line ends Milton's sonnet on 'how my light is spent'?
They also serve who only stand and wait
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.
Q 27Which fellow poet became Milton's assistant in government service in 1657 and later helped shield him from the restored monarchy?
Andrew Marvell
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.
Q 28Milton's 1652 sonnet hailing 'our chief of men' was addressed to whom?
Oliver Cromwell
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.
Q 29What happened to Milton at the Restoration in 1660?
He hid, was arrested and briefly jailed
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.
Q 30Which Milton pamphlet of 1660 urged England not to bring back the king?
The Ready and Easy Way
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.