Areopagitica: A speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, to the Parliament of England is a 1644 prose polemical tract by the English poet and polemical author John Milton opposing licensing and censorship. Areopagitica is among history's most influential and impassioned philosophical defenses of the principle of a right to freedom of speech and expression. It is regarded as one of the most eloquent defenses of press freedom ever written because many of its expressed principles form the basis for modern justifications of that right.