The Riverside Milton [Hardcover]

John Milton (Author), Roy Flannagan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 9, 1998 | ISBN-10: 0395809991 | ISBN-13: 978-0395809990 | Edition: 1

The first one-volume anthology of John Milton's complete poetry and selected prose to be published in over 30 years, The Riverside Milton reflects the highest quality and most current scholarship. As editor of The Milton Quarterly for 30 years, Roy Flannagan is uniquely qualified to survey Milton's work. Pedagogy includes a comprehensive index designed to help students from undergraduate to graduate levels conceive paper topics; factual introductions; extensive annotations with references; margin definitions; and a chronology.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Psalm 136
Psalm 1; Done Into Verse 1653
Psalm 2; Done August 8, 1653 - Terzetti
Psalm 3; When He Fled From Absalom; August 9, 1653
Psalm 4; August 10, 1653
Psalm 5; August 12, 1653
Psalm 6; August 13, 1643
Psalm 7; Upon Words Of Chush The Benjamite; August 14, 1653
Psalm 80
Psalm 81
Psalm 82
Psalm 83
Psalm 84
Psalm 85
Psalm 86
Psalm 87
Psalm 88
Psalm 8; August 14, 1653
To Mr. John Milton, Gentleman Of England: Ode
Another On The Same
Arcades
At A Solemn Musick
At A Vacation Exercise In The College
Canzone
Comus
Elegy: 1. To Charles Diodati
Elegy: 2. On The Death Of The Beadle Of The University Of Cambridge
Elegy: 3. On The Death Of The Bishop Of Winchester
Elegy: 4. To Thomas Young
Elegy: 5. On The Coming Of Spring
Elegy: 6. To Charles Diodati, Lingering In The Country
An Epitaph On The Marchioness Of Winchester
Il Penseroso
Lycidas
On The Death Of A Fair Infant Dying Of A Cough
On The Morning Of Christ's Nativity
On The Morning Of Christ's Nativity: The Hymn
On The New Forces Of Conscience Under The Long Parliament
On The University Carrier
Paradise Lost
Paradise Regained
A Paraphrase On Psalm 114
The Passion
Samson Agonistes
Second Sonnet On Tetrachordon
Sonnet: 10. To The Lady Margaret Ley
Sonnet: 11. On The Detraction Followed My Writing Treatises
Sonnet: 13. To Mr. H. Lawes, On His Airs
Sonnet: 14. On The Religious Memory Of Catherine Thomason
Sonnet: 15. To The Lord General Fairfax
Sonnet: 16. To The Lord General Cromwell, May 1652
Sonnet: 17
Sonnet: 17. To Sir Henry Vane The Younger
Sonnet: 18. On The Late Massacre In Piedmont
Sonnet: 19. On His Blindness
Sonnet: 2
Sonnet: 21. To Cyriack Skinner
Sonnet: 23. On His Deceased Wife
Sonnet: 3
Sonnet: 4
Sonnet: 5
Sonnet: 6
Sonnet: 7
Sonnet: 8. When The Assault Was Intended To The City
Sonnet: 9. To A Virtuous Young Lady
To The Nightingale
Upon The Circumcision
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Product Details

• Hardcover: 1248 pages
• Publisher: Wadsworth Publishing; 1 edition (March 9, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395809991
• ISBN-13: 978-0395809990
• Product Dimensions: 10.3 x 8.1 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #431,112 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars I will not use this text again, March 9, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Riverside Milton (Hardcover)

I find this edition impossible for classroom use and, after this semester, I will not use it again. I wish the venerable Hughes edition was available and affordable: somebody should reissue it if it is going out of print, as it remains the better textbook.

Here are my complaints:

*The prose is riddled with what seem to me to be small typos--I'm not talking about orginal spelling, but about things like "buy" for "but" (p. 937) and so on. There is one of these every 2-3 pages on average, and this is just too many.

*Some of the notes seem designed not to assist undergraduate readers but to demonstrate the editor's grasp of secondary scholarship. Why else would a note to _Comus_ direct readers to Leah Marcus and NOT also offer succinct remarks about the controversy surrounding Sports and mirth? What good is a note like that to the average undergraduate reader?

*The notes are so frequently about minor textual issues--the kind of thing that can go in an appendix and that undergrads are unlikely to care about--that students after a while stop looking at them altogether. That does not help anybody.

*The notes--especially to the prose--do not supply anything like the kind of necessary information that any classroom text should provide. This text does not identify the scriptural passages Milton cites, etc. For example, when Milton refers to a "covnant" in Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and/or The Readie and Easie Way, students need a note about The Solemn League and Covenant, but there is no such thing.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Looking forward to second printing, March 8, 2001

By 

Patrick Harrison - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Riverside Milton (Hardcover)

This up-to-date edition of Milton's complete poetry and major prose fills the urgent need for a successor to the venerable student's edition Merritt Hughes prepared half a century ago (now, alas, out of print).

One outstanding virtue of the Riverside Milton is its editor, Roy Flannagan. Flannagan is remarkably responsive to readers' comments, which he promises to take into account in the preparation of future editions (the first of which is said to be in press as of this writing). Unfortunately, a revised edition of the book is instantly needed. In its first printing, the Riverside Milton is badly marred by the absence of a table of contents to the poems and of indices to titles and first lines. Without these helps, it is impossible to find the shorter pieces without a considerable amount of page-turning--and difficult to justify giving the book more than three stars.

Some will be delighted to find that Flannagan has mixed textual notes with substantive ones at the bottom of the page; others (including, I suspect, most undergraduates) will find the mixture irritating, and will resent all the extra head-bobbing between text and annotations. Unexceptionable, I believe, is Flannagan's decision to preserve Milton's 17th-century spelling and punctuation, which greatly facilitates scanning the lines and reading them aloud.

As for the substance of the substantive notes, I believe it generally to be sound, though a handful of glosses seem far fetched and little worth. For example, in commenting upon how "Smiles . . . love to live in dimple sleek" ("L'Allegro," lines 28-30), Flannagan tells us that "Smiles do live in dimples, and dimples live in smooth (youthful) or sleek and plump faces. Also, a personified Smile lives in a dimple the way that a fairy in Midsummer Night's Dream may live in a flower."

As it now stands, the Riverside Milton is a work more of promise than of perfection. Those interested in purchasing the text should wait until the second printing is available, since it will contain the table of contents needed for the book to be truly usable.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Advantages, Disadvantages, May 15, 2007

By 

Ben Hodges (Atlanta) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Riverside Milton (Hardcover)

I've read about 1000 pages of this text and feel qualified to judge it dispassionately.

Here's the deal with it. It has great advantages which other Milton anthologies do not (excellent textual scholarship--and most importantly, the original spelling). But it has deep flaws that irk and pain every student who has to use this book.

* One: as one student said, it feels and read like a science book (bad design, in other words: it has no aesthetic appeal).
* Two: the typescript and layout are just counterintuitive: the footnotes are so hard to read sometimes as they are usually crammed in on each page--the whole book looks crammed and makes the reader feel crammed.
* Three: but the kicker--the downright absurd footnotes.

Let me explain: _Comus_, for example, has over 1000 footnotes. Flannagan has never heard of making textual notes _end_notes and keeping interpretative, allusional, or historical notes as footnotes. The result? The reader getting stopped twice on every line not knowing whether to keep reading or whether to spend five minutes each time reading all the damn notes! But what really stinks is that you have no idea whether the note will tell you something really important, say about the English Civil War, differing traits Bacchus' "madness," the genealogy of some lot of gods, or a crucial Bible passage--or whether it will just be one of the absolutely endless and useless textual notes.

Want a good example? By far my favorite--in _Comus_, there is a footnote on the word "where." The footnote informs the reader that Milton originally spelt the word "were" in the manuscript, tried to insert the "h" in, but then decided that he might as well rewrite the word, so he crossed it out, and spelt it correctly.

Are you kidding me?! And these inundate the whole book.

Supposedly a new "original spelling" edition of Milton is coming out next Spring, so I'd wait for that one. If you must have this for some reason, use a library copy. You won't want to keep it.