Customer Reviews

The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton (Modern Library)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

For many of us, this is the volume of Milton for which we have been waiting. The Notes are useful without being overwhelming & the selection from his prose work is very generous. Overall, this is a significant offering to all lovers of poetry, 17th Century literature, and theology. Together with the newly published edition of Shakespeare's First Folio, this edition of Milton is the bedrock of English Literature and should not be read, but re-read for a lifetime.

Somewhere in the illegibly tiny notes to the Riverside Milton are some valuable bibliographic citations and other good information. So if you are a Milton scholar I'm afraid you can't make any excuse to avoid consulting that poorly designed doorstop. Also, if you need original spelling, Riverside is a convenient place to check.

If you are anything other than a Milton scholar who needs to check all the commentaries & annotations of all the editors -- if you are one of the rare persisting "general readers" curious to read everything -- then this Modern Library edition, "The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton," is a much more usable and friendly answer to your needs than the Riverside.

ML's bigger and better font & less stark paper color make a real difference if you plan on reading literature as opposed to making use of a reference book. Both volumes offer extensive selections from Milton's prose; Riverside's best advantage is including Milton's "Treatise of Civil Power" (1659). (Riverside also has all the prolusions; ML just nos. 1 & 7. On the whole, the representation of Milton's prose oeuvre is a wash.) ML's best advantage in the prose, and it is a weighty one, is its treatment of the crucial "Christian Doctrine." Riverside's CD looks more complete than it is, because it widely (and inconsistently) fails to note where omissions have been made. Riverside omits passages of crucial interest to the reader of Paradise Lost. ML gives a very complete and thoughtful selection from CD (lightened by removing most series of proof texts), but its greatest advantage here is providing plentiful & good footnotes, including many references to Paradise Lost. Shockingly, and unconscionably, Riverside provides NO annotation to Christian Doctrine. In my mind, this clearly betrays an assumption that you, the reader, are not actually interested in reading this important work. Flannagan hollowly claims that the (overrated) authorship dispute has "forced" him to print the text without footnotes. (I suspect the fact that Merritt Hughes did not annotate CD--one of the few blemishes in that great edition--also has something to do with the omission.) All you have to do is browse through ML's excellent footnotes & selections to realize how much you're missing here.

Riverside's failure to cross-reference is a more general problem. For example, if you read Paradise Lost in the Riverside, when the footnotes refer you to "Areopagitica" or "The Reason of Church Government," you are only given page numbers in the Yale edition--even though the relevant passages are right there in the Riverside! In comparison, ML always provides its own page numbers, so that you can go read that passage from Areopagitica now, without a trip to the library.

As I said at the beginning of this review, I will not lie and deny that Flannagan's notes often go beyond what is available in ML. But it's hardly as if ML's scholarly notes are a subset of the good information in Riverside--ML has excellent notes on sources and allusions, so there are great references to Aristotle & Anselm, the Iliad, and so forth, that are not also found in Riverside. Sometimes Riverside's notes just try too hard, as when we get three verbose lines defining Aristotle's notion of form, with no attempt whatsoever to apply its meaning to the poem before us. ML is certainly better on glossing the difficulties of Milton's English, and in general ML tends to provide little nuggets of literary appreciation in its critical notes, rather than to try to sum up a status quaestionis.

Finally, a pet peeve: the Riverside misprints ghastly wrong Greek in places where ML has been more careful.

As far as "Paradise Lost" is concerned, this book has superb annotation that is not as overbearing (though useful) as the edition by Fowler; notes are clear and concise, with verse cross-refrences and citation of many commentators. As an undergrad, I can greatly appreciate such reader friendly texts that elucidate obscure or outdated words and phrases, affording a lot more time to enjoy Milton otherwise spent in a dictionary. It also has a great introduction to PL, as well as selected illustrations.

The obligatory remark encompassing modern appreciation for Milton was given to us from T.S. Eliot, who believed that, "of no other poet is it so difficult to consider the poetry simply as poetry, without our theological and political dispositions... making unlawful entry." It is impossible to surmise and internalize Milton's poetry without also having to take in the historical aura of the radical man - the Milton of Parliamentary holy war and old-timey religious conservatism. His dour presence floats down to us through filtered history and infuses his poetical works with our new, never-ending quest to search for the motivation of the artist through his or her art. It is this unfair, skewed lens through which we seek the man through the work that we distort "Lycidas" into a declaration of war against the Anglican priesthood rather than a young poet's fearful hope of obtaining Fame before he, too, dies. This skewed lens that views "Comus" as solely a piece of political resurgence of a disgraced Earl's family rather than a confident poet's first attempt to fuse epic aesthetics with austere Christian doctrine. And this skewed lens that lessens the infinite importance of "Paradise Lost," its indelible impact on all major writers in English since, to a longish document of literary curio of occasional allegorical significance.

There is a great deal of time, politicking, and structure to overcome when reading Milton, whether just being introduced to his work or continually engaged with it. These troubles in reading him seep through most of his poems and prose. And even without the myth of the poet clouding his meaning, he was a terribly learned writer, and his work can be difficult to approach for even the casual scholar.

Which is why this edition of Milton's poetry and prose possesses a magisterial significance over all other currently and formerly published editions. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon have done a remarkable job of assuaging the gaps between wizened Milton and a contemporary readership. As stated in this edition's general preface, the aim of this publication was to make his "poetry and prose...almost entirely modernized." The numerous footnotes (thank God, an edition that sagaciously gives us the explanations on the same page as the text, rather than the obsolescent Oxford World Editions than continue to insist on annoying, certainly close to psychically debilitating when reading, endnotes hidden in the last coarse pages of the book) flesh out the world and the mind of Milton for the interested reader, lessening the mental interruptions caused by frequent Google searches for this ancient God, or that historical figure, or that poetical allusion, which editions with fewer, less thorough, or even no footnotes require as supplement to make Milton tenable.

This is a comprehensive publication, the likes of which I wish were made more often. It is a shame, hurtful to our overall cultural integrity, that we generally look on Milton as a religious wacko, or his work as a quagmire of venous allusions, because his poetry his so achingly beautiful, his philosophical observations still probing and important to our time, his love to reunite the past literary traditions with the current so drastically needed by our disenfranchised society hammering itself slowly to pieces in search of something dear to hold on to and unite our affairs. Like the thousand pieces of Osiris' scattered body that Milton offers us in "Areopagitica" as an allegory to fractured Truth, we too can find meaning in Milton's embattled name and work in the difficult, pluralistic today.

This is it, finally, a worthy successor to the Merritt Hughes edition of Milton. Excellent footnotes and introductions, a great selection of prose. This is all the Milton that most of us will ever need. A nicely bound solid volume. A desert island book if ever there were one. The pages are thick enough (not like the Norton Anthologies, for example, which has pages so thin you can see right through them). At a quite reasonable price too.

My 3 star rating is purely a bibliophile's response to the poor quality binding given an otherwise excellent edition of John Milton's recovered work. As a collection of pages it's a great achievement, but as a useable volume to be read and handled it's a piece of @#$%. What's most irritating is that the book could have been given fine cloth boards and possibly even a leather spine for less than five or six dollars more. Given the $35 discounted price it could have still come in under $40 and matched the LOA and Everyman's bookbinding standard. It should be noted that the Dickens "Nonesuch" editions offer approximately a 10" x 7" format of quality cloth, leather spines and mylar dust jackets for anywhere from $23 to $35.

Some years back Modern Library went down the road to minimal standards in hardcover books replacing full Smythe sewn bindings and sturdy cloth boards with glue and cheap paper over cardboard. In smaller volumes of poetry or prose this is unfortunate but perhaps acceptable given the price. However, in a $35 volume approaching 3" in thickness it's a disaster waiting to happen. Only marginally more sturdy than a paperback, the weight alone will tear such a volume apart in a very short period of time just through normal reading. Any rough handling of the type typical of lower classmen taking English Lit 1-2 will render the work suitable only for emergency toilet paper in the freshman dorm. If at all possible I would search out alternative sellers to ascertain if the volume is available in a library or text book binding as the additional cost would be money well spent. Alternatively, if you're willing to spend a little more ($50+) upfront, I would highly recommend the Hackett Publications edition which is similar in content and of vastly superior construction.

There's plenty of reviews on content included within these pages, but the above information is not available on the product description page nor generally commented upon by other reviewers. I would hope that for some purchasers this might make them pause before plunging ahead with a purchase they might not be totally happy with. You are, after all, being asked to pay $35 for non copyrighted material and should expect to receive a product approaching $35 of material value. This volume does not meet that expectation.

11/18/11

Amazon is bouncing it's prices all over the place in what one would have to call an opportunistic computer modeled pricing system. This volume jumped to $52 on the day of this writing and, no doubt, will settle back into a more normal range. I would, if I could, drop the star rating down even further in response to this price hike. I would urge you to now, more than ever, consider the Hackett Publications "Complete Poems and Major Prose" which is superior in every aspect.

I Enjoy much of what I have read by Milton, and for my birthday this year I asked for a hardback book with both Paradise Lost and Regained, This was the only one with a photo and good description of it. As it was the only book that could be found on Amazon with the two books, this is the book I received, WOW, I no longer need any other of my paperbacks of Miltons works, this has them all. I am not the person to look to for proper this and proper that, nor about the translation or other things like that, I am the person that can tell you the stories are in there and it as near as I can tell the pretty much the same as the other 2 versions I own, no noticeable difference.

You can get the Complete Poems in a dozen different editions, so the heart of a new collection like this is in the notes. I hoped the editors would gift us with a new Milton, find some way to shake up the stereotype, but alas, their poet's the government-issue Great Man swaddled in lightning and footnotes.

Kerrigan, Rumrich, Braden and Fallon--all senior Miltonists, all men--don't feel much need to justify the grand tone and theological speculations of the `Miltonic' to our more secular, less Baroque age. We also don't get a real peek into the controversies and battle lines of modern-day Milton studies. The result's a handsome, helpful, kind of innocuous edition of an indisputably great poet; great in a way that makes you wonder how much work greatness, as Milton and his editors here conceive it, really does for us anymore.