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—— ON THIS DAY ——
APRIL 27, 1667
London, England
358 years ago
John Milton, engraving after William Faithorne, 1670 — the blind poet who dictated Paradise Lost in the years following the Restoration, having lost everything else.
On April 27, 1667, John Milton signed a contract with publisher Samuel Simmons, selling the rights to Paradise Lost for £5 — with an additional £5 to be paid when each of the first three editions sold out. The first edition did sell out. Milton received a second payment of £5. He never received the third. He died in 1674, having received a total of £10 for the poem that most scholars consider the greatest epic in the English language.
The circumstances of the poem's composition are one of literature's most remarkable stories. Milton had been a prominent public intellectual during the Interregnum — a defender of the execution of Charles I, an advocate for divorce reform, and the author of Areopagitica, the most eloquent defence of freedom of the press in English. When the monarchy was restored in 1660, he lost his government position and was briefly imprisoned. He was also completely blind — had been since 1652. Paradise Lost was dictated to amanuenses, including his daughters, in the years between 1658 and 1663.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
The title page of the first edition of Paradise Lost, 1667 — one of the most consequential publications in the history of English literature, sold for £5.
The poem itself — twelve books of blank verse, retelling the story of Satan's fall, the creation of the world, and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden — is a work of such sustained intellectual ambition and verbal mastery that its place in the canon has never been seriously challenged. T.S. Eliot called it 'the greatest poem in the English language,' despite having reservations about it. Samuel Johnson, who disliked it personally, called it 'one of the greatest productions of the human mind.' The praise has always been slightly reluctant and entirely consistent.
The most controversial aspect of Paradise Lost has always been its Satan — one of the most compelling characters in English literature, whose speeches in the opening books carry a rhetorical force and psychological complexity that the poem's God cannot quite match. William Blake famously argued that Milton was 'of the Devil's party without knowing it.' Whether Milton intended Satan to be sympathetic, whether the poem's theology is coherent, and what exactly it means to 'justify the ways of God to men' are questions that have been debated for 350 years and remain genuinely open.
Milton's blindness gave the poem something it might not otherwise have had. The poem's light imagery — 'Hail holy Light' — comes from a man who had not seen light for fifteen years. The description of Satan surveying Eden's beauty has the quality of someone remembering what beauty looks like, with a precision that can only come from having once seen it and knowing it is gone. Paradise Lost is full of a specific kind of loss that only a blind poet could have given it.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
Paradise Lost is the founding text of the English Protestant poetic tradition — and one of the deepest explorations of free will, obedience, and rebellion in any literature. The questions it asks — why do humans choose badly? what is the nature of evil? what does it mean to be expelled from a paradise we did not deserve? — are not exclusively theological.
Milton's career illustrates the relationship between political defeat and artistic achievement. He wrote Paradise Lost after the political cause he had spent his life defending was crushed. The poem's themes — fall, exile, perseverance in darkness — are not accidental. The poem is his response to the Restoration, and his refusal to give up.
The £5 transaction is one of history's great monuments to the gap between market value and literary value. Five pounds bought one of the greatest poems in English. The mismatch between what we pay artists and what their work is worth has been a feature of every era since.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
On April 27, 1667, a blind, politically defeated English poet sold the rights to his life's work for £5. He had dictated it in darkness over several years, to daughters who were not always willing amanuenses. The poem outlasted everyone who ignored it, everyone who paid him inadequately, and every political settlement that had defeated him. Milton wrote Paradise Lost as if the future were watching. It was.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
"Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light."
— John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book II
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about John Milton, Paradise Lost, the English Civil War that shaped him, and the extraordinary story of a blind poet dictating one of the greatest poems in the language from memory?
