John Milton

English poet and political activist — author of Paradise Lost — Latin Secretary to Oliver Cromwell — who wrote the greatest epic poem in the English language while blind — and whose Areopagitica is the foundational argument for press freedom.

Creates Paradise Lost as the supreme English epic — Milton's blank verse account of the Fall (combining classical epic conventions, Protestant theology, and Renaissance humanism) is the most ambitious literary achievement in English; Satan's characterization (charismatic, self-destructive, defiant) is the model for the Romantic hero and every subsequent sympathetic villain.