John Milton John Milton John Milton (9 December 16088 November 1674) was an English poet, polemicist, man of letters, and civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under its Council of State and later under Oliver Cromwell. He wrote at a time of religious flux and political upheaval, and is best known for his epic poem "Paradise Lost" (1667), written in blank verse. Writing in English, Latin, Greek, and Italian, he achieved international renown within his lifetime, and his celebrated "Areopagitica" (1644), written in condemnation of pre-publication censorship, is among history's most influential and impassioned defences of free speech and freedom of
The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs called it "the best poem I know" According to the philologist E. V. Gordon "Sigurd the Volsung" is "incomparably the greatest poem – perhaps the only great poem – in English which has been inspired by Norse literature", and George Bernard Shaw went so far as to call it "the greatest epic since Homer". However the novelist Eric Linklater, while acknowledging that "Morris tells his story with endless invention, with a brilliant profusion of detail", complained that the poem's "Thames-side heroism" conveyed too facile a sense of tragedy. It has never had a wide readership, and contemporary judgements on "Sigurd"