John Milton

John Milton was an English poet, polemicist and civil servant who served as Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Council of State from 1649 to 1660, composing the Commonwealth’s official Latin correspondence. He was totally blind by 1652 and dictated the work of his later years, including Paradise Lost, published in 1667. The sonnet that ends with this line belongs to the same decade in which he lost his sight, and was first printed in the 1673 collection of his Poems.