John Milton

Milton studied at Cambridge in the 1620s, then spent years writing poetry privately and cranking out radical pamphlets as Charles I's rule fractured into civil war. His politics were dangerous enough to land him a post under Cromwell's Commonwealth, serving as a civil servant through the 1650s. The Restoration in 1660 cost him that platform, and by then he'd lost his sight. He used the isolation to finish Paradise Lost, published in 1667 — an epic in unrhymed verse, the first modern English writer to try it outside translation or theatre. He died in 1674, broke and on the margins in England, b…