John Milton

John Milton was an English poet, polemicist and civil servant, born on 9 December 1608 and dead on 8 November 1674. His epic poem Paradise Lost, published in 1667 in blank verse, addresses the fall of man, including the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and it was written in a time of immense religious flux and political upheaval. He served as a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under its Council of State and later under Oliver Cromwell. His Areopagitica of 1644 condemned pre-publication censorship and is among the most influential defences of freedom of speech and freedom of the press in history.