John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell. Writing in English, Latin, Greek, and Italian, he achieved international renown within his lifetime, and his celebrated Areopagitica —written in condemnation of pre-publication censorship—is among history's most influential and impassioned defences of free speech and freedom of the press. Samuel Johnson praised Paradise Lost as "a poem which...with respect to design may claim the first place, and with respect to performance, the second, among the productions of the human mind," though he described Milton's politics as those of an "acrimonious and surly republican".
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