John Milton

John Milton composed Paradise Lost — more than ten thousand lines of epic blank verse — entirely in his head, after going completely blind in his forties. Each morning he dictated the verses that had come to him overnight, joking that he needed to be "milked." He sold the rights for ten pounds.

Before the epic, he had been Latin secretary to Cromwell's republic and Europe's most notorious defender of free speech and regicide; at the Restoration he was briefly imprisoned, and friends including Andrew Marvell helped keep him from execution.

His sonnet on his blindness ends with one of the most consoling lines in English: "They also serve who only stand and wait."