Today is the 400th anniversary of John Milton's birth. Milton remains a controversial figure, someone whose political and religious views were too radical for his contemporaries until his death in 1674, and after his death drew criticism from T.S. Eliot amongst others for his dense, Latinate verse, with its web of extra-textual preoccupations.
Perhaps this is why there is not much going on to commemorate his life today. His surly, staunch Republicanism, pamphlets against episcopacy and the isolation that occurred after the onset of blindness later in his life positioned him as the ultimate outsider, in a 'party of one'. Is he still too much for the state to handle?
Milton lived during one of the most turbulent periods in English history, one in which the powers of Parliament as we know them today were instituted, and one in which a King was killed by his subjects.
He beqeathed to us one of the greatest works of English Literature, PARADISE LOST, an utterly magnificent blank-verse epic which pits a tyrannical God against a charismatic Satan. One of the misconceptions of the poem is that Milton is somehow in favour of Satan as an anti-authority figure. This is because he makes God and Jesus speak in workmanlike consecutive clauses, rendering them dull and uninspiring, whereas Satan's rhetorical flair makes him positively magnetic. But all is not as it seems, since the Serpentine twists and turns of his locution makes a mockery of sense. Here are tales told by an idiot: sound and fury, signifying nothing. It is with good reason Milton dubs him the 'Great Deceiver'.
PARADISE LOST was written between 1658-1664, before and during the Restoration of the Stuarts, after which Milton had to go into hiding once a warrant was issued for his arrest. The struggle of his conscience and his beliefs with the need to protect himself are played out in the poem. SAMSON AGONISTES, written in 1671, is a brooding character study in reflection, a cry from the darkness that had left him - as it had his subject - 'Eyeless in Gaza'. But it also aimed bile at all of those blind enough to accept the return of the King. Perhaps Milton would have been happy to tear the temple down and take everyone with him if he could, but by that stage he was largely powerless.
During his life he also wrote against censorship and argued the case for divorce which at the time amounted to heresy. When he published EIKONOKLASTES in 1649, a fervent defence of the Regicide, he sought to destroy the figure of Charles I. The literal translation of the title is 'image breaker'.
We must celebrate Milton as one of our greatest iconoclasts, whose conviction in questioning authority and supporting the Parliament presents him as one of the most enduring advocates for liberty and democracy in England's history.
