John Milton wrote some of the greatest poetry in the English language, filled with drama and energy. This selection celebrates the best of his verse in all its richness and variety, setting Milton's work against the arc of his turbulent life. Here are schoolboy writings and the verses of the university wit, sonnets on spring, love, time, work and ambition, a political protest and, most movingly, a dream of his dead second wife. There are extracts from the epic "Paradise Lost", describing the rebellious hero-villain Satan, and showing Adam and Eve discovering the joys and problems of marriage. Here too are lines from the dark verse drama "Samson Agonistes", written near the end of Milton's life, when he had endured loss, blindness and persecution.

Author Biography

John Milton was born in London on December 9, 1608, and studied at the University of Cambridge. He originally planned to become a clergyman, but abandoned those ambitions to become a poet. Political in his writings, he served a government post during the time of the Commonwealth. By 1660, he was completely blind but continued to write. He died in 1674. Biographer Claire Tomalin was born in London in 1933. She is the author of highly acclaimed biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft, Katherine Mansfield and Jane Austen. Her biography of the seventeenth-century diarist Samuel Pepys (2002) won the the Samuel Pepys Award, and the 2002 Whitbread Book of the Year award. Claire Tomalin lives in London with her husband Michael Frayn.