John Milton

Milton spent his thirties and forties as a pamphleteer and civil servant for the English Republic, writing prose defenses of regicide and press freedom and serving as Latin secretary under Cromwell, work that cost him his eyesight, which failed completely by 1652, likely from glaucoma, and nearly cost him his life when the monarchy returned in 1660.

Blind, briefly imprisoned, and stripped of his public standing at the Restoration, he dictated Paradise Lost to his daughters and assistants over the 1660s, an epic in blank verse that recasts Genesis as cosmic tragedy: Satan's fall from Heaven rendered with such rhetorical power that readers from Blake onward have argued the poem secretly sides with him.

He published the poem in 1667 for a flat fee of five pounds, added a sequel, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes before his death in 1674, having built, from political defeat, English poetry's most ambitious single work.