Episode Details

Picture the most wanted man in England, his books burned in the streets, his allies executed, completely blind and hiding from a king's agents. That is where John Milton composed the greatest epic poem in the English language. This episode strips away the ruffled-collar stereotype to follow Milton from his 1608 London birth, in a household financed by a father disinherited for embracing Protestantism, through candlelit late-night reading, alienation at Cambridge where peers mocked him as the Lady of Christ's College, six years of self-directed study, and a 1638 visit to Galileo under house arrest in Florence.

We examine the disastrous marriage to 17-year-old royalist Mary Powell, the divorce pamphlets that scandalized the religious establishment, and how Parliament's 1643 licensing order pushed him to write a foundational defense of a free press. The episode then covers his role as Secretary for Foreign Tongues defending the execution of Charles I to a horrified Europe, the total blindness that struck in 1652, the workflow of dictation to amanuenses including Andrew Marvell, the Restoration of 1660 that made him a fugitive, and the dictated 10,000-line epic in unrhymed blank verse that he defended as a recovery of ancient liberty.

• How seeing Galileo silenced by the Inquisition hardened Milton's lifelong hatred of censorship
• Why a domestic dispute over an incompatible marriage escalated into an argument for freedom of thought and speech
• Holding multilingual diplomatic arguments in working memory after losing his sight at 43
• Milton's rejection of rhyme as bondage and blank verse as an act of artistic liberty
• Satan's republican rhetoric, a lost paradise, and how the failed English Revolution shaped the poem's themes and later influenced American revolutionaries