John Milton Quote by Anna Beer

Milton was the first person who really experimented with putting politics into sonnets.

— Robert Hass

“John Milton (December 9, 1608 – November 8, 1674) was an English poet, prose polemicist, and civil servant for the English Commonwealth. Most famed…

— John Milton

“John Milton has, since his own lifetime, always been one of the major figures in English literature, but his reputation has changed constantly. He…

— Ronald Carter

“Meaning Michael Milton; meaning the whole thing.”

— John Irving

“Milton argued, in 1649, after the execution of Charles I, that a people 'free by nature' had a right to overthrow a tyrant; a…

— Ronald Carter

“Part of what Milton valued in a good book then was contact with the mind of an author rendered otherwise inaccessible by distance or…

— Leland Ryken

“It’s every man for himself,” he said, and went back to reading. After my mother had died and he’d been laid off from his…

— Jeffrey Ford

“Political activists rarely like fiction of any kind. Literature is about ambiguity, mixed emotions, and guilty pleasures. Politics is about ideals and action.”

— Christopher Bram

“Walden is the report of a man torn by two powerful and opposing drives – the desire to enjoy the world and the urge…

— E.B. White

Read not Milton, for he is dry; nor Shakespeare, for he wrote of common life.

— Charles Stuart Calverley

“Gilbert Keith Chesterton (that fabulously large Catholic writer) overheard someone making fun of Milton (it didn't matter that the insults were all true).”

— N.D. Wilson

“The whole political mess, the universal squalor, the essential pettiness of mankind oppressed him and he’d submerged himself in work and writing and books.”

— Laird Barron