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 Eve of St. Agnes revealed in the poem's final stanza and the beadsman, "after thousand aves told, / For aye unsought for slept among his ashes cold". Rudyard Kipling's short story "Wireless" (1902) has the narrator witnessing a recreation of the poem by a man in a trance who, by virtue of the similarities of his situation to that of Keats (he is a consumptive apothecary's assistant), becomes "tuned" to the poet. Four lines from the final stanza of Keats' poem form the motto of H. P. Lovecraft's 1926 story "The Outsider". The Eve of St. Agnes The Eve of St. Agnes is a