John Milton
John Milton
John Miltonwas an English poet, polemicist, and man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell. He wrote at a time of religious flux and political upheaval, and is best known for his epic poem Paradise Lost, written in blank verse...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth9 December 1608
heroic life poems writers-and-writing
Let those who would write heroic poems make their life an heroic poem.
absolutely active books bred certain contain dead intellect life living purest soul whose
Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a certain potency of life in them, to be as active as the soul whose progeny they are; they preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of the living intellect that bred them.
absolutely active books bred contain dead intellect life living preserve purest soul whose
Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them
fresh last tomorrow
At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue; / Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.
madness
Demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy, / And moon-struck madness.
belated dreams fairy forest midnight moon overhead peasant side whose
Fairy elves, / Whose midnight revels, by a forest side / Or fountain, some belated peasant sees, / Or dreams he sees, while overhead the moon / Sits arbitress.
contagion flashy foul hungry lean mist pipes rank rot sheep songs wretched
And when they list, their lean and flashy songs / Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw, / The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, / But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw, / Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread.
bloody infant mother
The bloody Piedmontese that rolled / Mother with infant down the rocks.
divinely fit love
She fair, divinely fair, fit love for Gods.
highest middle sat tree
Thence up he flew, and on the Tree of Life,/ The middle tree and highest there that grew, / Sat like a cormorant.
blaze eclipse hope total
O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,/ Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse / Without all hope of day!
fiery shades
O'er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp, / Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death.
gorgeous presenting sometime sweeping tale tragedy
Sometime let gorgeous Tragedy / In sceptred pall come sweeping by, / Presenting Thebes, or Pelops' line, / Or the tale of Troy divine.
imitate knowledge learning love
The end of learning is to know God, and out of that knowledge to love Him and imitate Him.