"Cliff Notes - Paradise Lost" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

Only six weeks after King Charles I's head rolled from his body
(Milton's friend Marvell wrote a famous ode on the occasion), Milton
became Latin secretary to Oliver Cromwell. It was his duty to
compose all the government's diplomatic correspondence in Latin, a
job probably concerned as much with public relations as with accurate
translation.

By this time Milton was blind, probably as a result of a cyst or
tumor of the pituitary gland. For the rest of his life he depended
on others to read to him and to write at his dictation. Because he
was not a patient man--he had the arrogance of a person conscious of
his talents--reading and writing for him was not easy. His daughters
objected to the tyranny he showed in demanding their time and then
complaining when they read incorrectly.

Mary died in 1652, leaving a blind man with three young daughters,
the eldest mentally retarded. Milton married again in 1657, but his
second wife, whom he called in a famous sonnet his "espoused saint,"
lived only fifteen months and died after giving birth to a daughter,
who also died. Milton married a third time, to a woman who looked
after him for the rest of his life and managed to bring order to a
household full of quarreling daughters, relatives, and visitors to
the famous writer.

In 1658, Oliver Cromwell had died, leaving England in the incompetent
hands of his son, Richard. The passions that had caused the Civil
War had cooled, and the king's son was asked to return, but on the
conditions which brought about the English constitutional monarchy.

The coming of Charles II meant the end of Milton's government job.
For a time he was in danger of his life and had to be hidden by
friends--one of his pamphlets had argued strongly in defense of
Charles I's beheading. Milton retired from public life and devoted
himself to the composition of Paradise Lost. By the time he had
finished dictating it to whoever got up early in the morning, two
other events had disturbed Milton's never very tranquil life. In
1665 he was forced by the Great Plague to leave London and live in a
Buckinghamshire village. A year later, in the Great Fire in 1666,
Milton lost the last piece of property he owned. He lived the last
few years of his life in considerable poverty, quite unlike the
comfort of his first pampered years in his father's house.

Paradise Lost (1667) is the culmination of his life's work. His
early poems, the exquisite "L'Allegro," "Il Penseroso," "Lycidas,"
the masque Comus, and the sonnets would all secure him a place among
the finest English poets. But it is Paradise Lost which makes it
impossible for you to ignore Milton. He wrote Paradise Regained
afterward, but it has nothing like the stature of Paradise Lost. (It
is not, as you might think, about Christ's sacrifice, but about his