Born in London in 1608, John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell. Milton wrote in the seventeenth century. It was the century of transition into our modern world, when the Civil Wars separated men from the older ways of living, and much that remained lively in the national imagination since the Middle Ages, was killed by the religious controversies. A great stylist and an experimentalist, Milton employed a language in this poem which is remarkable for sustained dignity. Paradise Regained followed Paradise Lost. It was published alongside the tragedy Samson Agonistes. Milton saw life as a struggle, the Puritan struggle, for the survival of the good and the virtuous. Milton died of kidney failure in 1674, aged sixty-five, in Bunhill, London, England.