John Milton was born on Bread Street in London, the son of a prosperous scrivener who also composed music. He was a brilliant and intensely serious student; at Cambridge his fellow students called him “the Lady of Christ’s” for his fine features and his refusal to join in their rougher amusements. After university he spent six years reading at his father’s house in the country, preparing himself, he believed, for a great work.

The great work had to wait twenty years. In the 1640s England slid into civil war between King Charles I and Parliament, and Milton threw himself into the struggle on Parliament’s side, writing pamphlets on church government, divorce and freedom. The finest of them, Areopagitica (1644), argues against requiring government licenses to print books. “As good almost kill a man as kill a good book,” he wrote: “who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.”

After the king was executed, Milton served Oliver Cromwell’s government as Secretary for Foreign Tongues, writing its letters in Latin. His eyesight was failing, and by about 1652, in his early forties, he was completely blind. When the monarchy was restored in 1660, he went into hiding, was briefly imprisoned, and might well have been executed. Friends intervened.

Blind, out of favor and in danger, he turned at last to the great work. Paradise Lost retells the fall of Satan and of Adam and Eve in more than ten thousand lines of blank verse. Milton composed it in his head, often at night, and in the morning dictated it to whoever was available to take it down: friends, paid helpers, and sometimes his daughters. He said he waited each morning to be “milked” of the lines he had composed.

In 1667 he sold the poem to a printer, Samuel Simmons, for five pounds, with another five due after the first printing sold out. It did. Paradise Lost is now counted among the greatest poems in English, and its Satan, proud and eloquent and doomed, among the most compelling characters in literature. Milton died in 1674.