John Milton

John Milton reached higher than almost any poet in English: he set out to justify the ways of God to men, and in Paradise Lost, twelve books of unrhymed blank verse charting the fall of Adam and Eve and the pride of Satan, he gave the language one of its supreme achievements. Yet he was more than a poet. He served the Commonwealth under Cromwell, coined new words from Latin and Greek, and in Areopagitica (1644) wrote one of history's most impassioned defences of free speech, even as blindness and the Restoration stripped away his public platform.

His Sun in Sagittarius rises in the first house, the sign doubled at his very core: the Jupiter-ruled philosopher-sage, a walking university radiating big-picture vision, born to shine simply by being himself. This is the free spirit who would not recant his republicanism to the end. His Moon, exalted in earthy Taurus, sat in the sixth house of service and daily duty, the steadfast, devoted mind that laboured on through hardship, dictating his epic verse when he could no longer see. From that union of soaring vision and patient toil, an immortal poem was born.