It’s the birthday of John Milton (1608-1674), who, while not often chosen as the person from history you’d most like to have dinner with, is hailed as the most important writer in the English language after Barbara Cartland. (Just kidding. Shakespeare. You knew that.)

Milton was born in London to a father who’d been kicked out of his father’s home for reading the wrong Bible, which is to say, a Protestant one. But Milton’s father made good for himself as a scrivener and money-lender and provided his family with a solid middle-class existence. Milton was the middle child of three who survived; he studied at St. Paul’s School and then Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he wrote poetry in English, Latin, and Italian, like you do.

He first intended to enter the priesthood, but Milton and the Church of England sort of bristled at one another, so things didn’t work out. He decided instead to become a poet. He prepared for this not by mooning about in ill-fitting clothes while thinking schmaltzy thoughts like our modern poets but by moving home, mooching off Daddy, and reading extensively in literature, philosophy, science, history, and like that for six years; during these years, his family moved from London to Buckinghamshire, possibly to avoid the plague. Milton then traveled to Italy and France and met Important People such as Galileo, who pops up later in Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), his anti-censorship tract. (See the 1847 painting by Solomon Alexander Hart of Milton meeting Galileo and his huge brain.) On his return, he settled in London, wrote radical political pamphlets, and was secretary for foreign languages for Oliver Cromwell’s government during the English Civil War. By the end of the war in 1651, Milton was completely blind, possibly due to glaucoma.

Cromwell died in 1658. Milton was arrested the next year, and after the Restoration of King Charles II received a slap on the wrist and went to live in the country for the rest of his life. (NB: Milton married three times. His first marriage was extremely rocky, very on-again-off-again, yet produced three daughters, a son, and a pro-divorce pamphlet, Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. I’m telling you, people who write pamphlets don’t get invited to dinners.)

Paradise Lost, Milton’s most famous work and one of the greatest epic poems in any language, was published in 1667, followed four years later by Paradise Regained. But one of his first published poems was “On Shakespeare” (1630), which begins:

What needs my Shakespeare for his honour’d Bones,

The labour of an age in pilèd Stones,

Or that his hallow’d reliques should be hid

Under a stary pointing Pyramid?…

(Read the rest here.)

Read some Milton this gray Monday because, in the words of my classmate some thirty years ago, “Milton rocks,” and stay scrupulously honest to the data.