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Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, and the Complete Shorter Poems
Edited by William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon
Derived from the Modern Library’s esteemed The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, this new volume, extensively revised and updated by its editors, contains Milton’s two late masterpieces, the brief epic Paradise Regained and the tragic drama Samson Agonistes. Age after age, these works have inspired new controversy and exciting interpretive debates. With expert commentary to guide the reader through historical contexts and verbal details, as well as the larger political and philosophical implications, the concerns of these canonical pieces live once again for today’s audiences. The volume also contains Milton’s complete shorter poems, which include such major achievements as “Lycidas,” “A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634,” “L’Allegro,” and “Il Penseroso,” and the author’s twenty-four influential sonnets. Thoughtfully edited and carefully designed, this is an essential publication of Milton’s classic poetry.
Praise for The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton
“For generations of readers Milton has been the measure of both eloquence and nobility of mind. For the next generation, this new Modern Library volume will be the standard. It brings Milton, as a poet and a thinker, vividly alive before us.”—Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the United States
“A superb edition of the great poet, with modernized spelling, lucid introductions to each work, illuminating footnotes, and fresh prose translations in Latin, Greek, and Italian. This will surely be the edition of choice for teachers, students, and general readers too.”—Leo Damrosch, Harvard University
Derived from the Modern Library’s esteemed The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, this new volume, extensively revised and updated by its editors, contains Milton’s two late masterpieces, the brief epic Paradise Regained and the tragic drama Samson Agonistes. Age after age, these works have inspired new controversy and exciting interpretive debates. With expert commentary to guide the reader through historical contexts and verbal details, as well as the larger political and philosophical implications, the concerns of these canonical pieces live once again for today’s audiences. The volume also contains Milton’s complete shorter poems, which include such major achievements as “Lycidas,” “A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634,” “L’Allegro,” and “Il Penseroso,” and the author’s twenty-four influential sonnets. Thoughtfully edited and carefully designed, this is an essential publication of Milton’s classic poetry.
Praise for The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton
“For generations of readers Milton has been the measure of both eloquence and nobility of mind. For the next generation, this new Modern Library volume will be the standard. It brings Milton, as a poet and a thinker, vividly alive before us.”—Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the United States
“A superb edition of the great poet, with modernized spelling, lucid introductions to each work, illuminating footnotes, and fresh prose translations in Latin, Greek, and Italian. This will surely be the edition of choice for teachers, students, and general readers too.”—Leo Damrosch, Harvard University
448 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2012
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81 people want to read
About the author
John Milton
3,778 books2,258 followersPeople best know John Milton, English scholar, for
Paradise Lost
, the epic poem of 1667 and an account of fall of humanity from grace.
Beelzebub, one fallen angel in Paradise Lost, of John Milton, lay in power next to Satan.
Belial, one fallen angel, rebelled against God in Paradise Lost of John Milton.
John Milton, polemicist, man of letters, served the civil Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell. He wrote in blank verse at a time of religious flux and political upheaval.
Prose of John Milton reflects deep personal convictions, a passion for freedom and self-determination, and the urgent issues and political turbulence of his day. He wrote in Latin, Greek, and Italian and achieved international renown within his lifetime, and his celebrated Areopagitica (1644) in condemnation of censorship before publication among most influential and impassioned defenses of free speech and the press of history.
William Hayley in biography of 1796 called and generally regarded John Milton, the "greatest ... author," "as one of the preeminent writers in the ... language," though since his death, critical reception oscillated often on his republicanism in the centuries. Samuel Johnson praised, "with respect to design may claim the first place, and with respect to performance, the second, among the productions of the ... mind," though he, a Tory and recipient of royal patronage, described politics of Milton, an "acrimonious and surly republican."
Because of his republicanism, centuries of British partisanship subjected John Milton.
Beelzebub, one fallen angel in Paradise Lost, of John Milton, lay in power next to Satan.
Belial, one fallen angel, rebelled against God in Paradise Lost of John Milton.
John Milton, polemicist, man of letters, served the civil Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell. He wrote in blank verse at a time of religious flux and political upheaval.
Prose of John Milton reflects deep personal convictions, a passion for freedom and self-determination, and the urgent issues and political turbulence of his day. He wrote in Latin, Greek, and Italian and achieved international renown within his lifetime, and his celebrated Areopagitica (1644) in condemnation of censorship before publication among most influential and impassioned defenses of free speech and the press of history.
William Hayley in biography of 1796 called and generally regarded John Milton, the "greatest ... author," "as one of the preeminent writers in the ... language," though since his death, critical reception oscillated often on his republicanism in the centuries. Samuel Johnson praised, "with respect to design may claim the first place, and with respect to performance, the second, among the productions of the ... mind," though he, a Tory and recipient of royal patronage, described politics of Milton, an "acrimonious and surly republican."
Because of his republicanism, centuries of British partisanship subjected John Milton.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
November 19, 2020
2/5stars
August 9, 2022
A hell of a volume, with all of his non Paradise Lost poems. Definitely worth getting.
THE SHORTER POEMS
I'm not sure most people know Milton wrote shorter poems, but he did. Not too many of them, and a great deal were either juvenile or trivial exercises, or else written in a Greek or Latin that few will ever have both the ability and interest to read; yet his constantly argumentative, rhetorical style fits well with short lyrics, as On Shakespeare and Sonnet 23 evidence really powerfully. The foreign poems (mostly Latin with a few exercises at Greek and Italian) seem to have deep, probably borrowed, metaphysical imagery that remains, nevertheless, pretty inaccessible in prose translation. More of interest are his number of early attempts at longer poems; L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, and the Masque are all essentially efforts at Spenserian pastoral dreams, at which Lycidas is the ultimate fulfillment. It's a strange bag, and I would even say that most of these poems aren't of interest, being formalist exercises that don't really inform the epic works at all except as retrospectively nascent precursors. It remains almost incredible to me that he could have written On Time, one the greatest lyric poems of all time, in this sea.
PARADISE REGAINED
Milton would kick out his guests if they spoke of this poem as an inferior to its predecessor; it seems to me good evidence of the total ineptitude of Milton scholarship that people fail to see that this is a consistent continuation of the epic. The prosody and language remain about equally strong (a little less martial, a little more star-gazing), and his width of interest -- grandiose visions, Satanic bombast, astral reverie at Christ and his Mother -- follows very consistently with the schema of Paradise Lost. Indeed, Milton's apologetic fervor seems stronger here than in PL, given that the sterner figure of Christ serves as a more accessible vantage point for trumpeting of the Divine than the wimpier Jesus of Paradise Lost or his imperious father; I think what upsets people about this poem is that it makes Satan look weak as he is defeated by the Christ, but it is so blindingly obvious that the charming Byronism of PL's Satan is an illusory state that I am almost in awe that academics, judging by what I've read of Milton scholarship, fall for this sort of trick ... or is it, perhaps, that Satanism has once again corrupted the academies?
SAMSON AGONISTES
It seemed to me that the purpose of Paradise Lost was a genuine epic, poetizing the order and grandeur of the divine cosmos, and that the supposedly ambiguous charm of Satan was nothing more than a genuine (and particularly successful) effort to show the charming surface that lays over a heart totally privated of the Good. Those who, however, insist on believing that Satan's rage against God is justified ought to read this poem instead, for it offers precisely this ambiguity. Whereas PL and PR had done their best to represent a divine viewpoint for its narration, this poem is firmly in the pagan caves. Samson resembles not only the ageing, leprous Job, but more greatly the Oedipus who dies at Colonus -- blinded, bitter, uncertain of how the divinities have left him so ruinous, stumbling towards the viewpoint that there is no God and that his ruin has been all self-caused. The poem sees Samson debating the remnants of his life with a string of passerbies, seeing the particular language of Milton reflection transmuted to a more agnostic, frightened vantage point; and its finale is not one of divine retribution but of an almost frighteningly pagan bloodbath in a very similar vein to that on which Racine's Iphegenie ends.
The notes in my edition apprised me of the struggles in Miltonic scholarship -- Goethe, supposedly, said of this poem that it was one of the closest approximations of authentic Greek tragedy ever made by moderns and, it seems, this has given rise to an endless slew of academics writing mediocre, constrained articles "pointing out" Christian elements within the text. Those who have a hard time seeing that it is a genuinely ancient-like tragedy, on account of its pre-salvation setting, told from an ultimately Christian perspective (to which the speakers are not privy, but the demiurgic narratorial structure is) are so off the mark that it is almost worth ignoring; but it should be noted that big Goethe understood that the Greeks were living, in motion, and that he would never say a deliberately anachronistic revival were authentic; rather, to employ the senibility of a classical drama while fully embracing modern knowledge would be the most genuine revival of them all. Instead, these academics feel a need to vaguely assert an overarching and uninformative descriptor of 'classical drama' or 'Christian drama', with seemingly negligible interest of what this is. Why these fellows spend their lives doing these pedantic, modular analyses, I'll never know ... or rather, see my comment above about academies ...
This poem, all the same, is doubly special on account of its divergeance from blank verse. Milton still writes in his typical iambics, but is very malleable with the feet, employs more feminine endings, often skips the initial syllable, and even uses anapestic substitutions much more often. You would think this might produce an irregular feeling, but consider Eliot's diagnosis of Milton's pentameters, that they are hardly lines in themselves but rather a pretext for him to employ long sentences spanning many lines irregularly, these being the base atoms of Milton's style. By freeing himself of the pentameter structure, the lines become more meaningful and forceful runs contrast with lighter trimeter/tetrameter feelings. Together with the already special subject matter, this produces some of Milton's finest writing of all.
THE SHORTER POEMS
I'm not sure most people know Milton wrote shorter poems, but he did. Not too many of them, and a great deal were either juvenile or trivial exercises, or else written in a Greek or Latin that few will ever have both the ability and interest to read; yet his constantly argumentative, rhetorical style fits well with short lyrics, as On Shakespeare and Sonnet 23 evidence really powerfully. The foreign poems (mostly Latin with a few exercises at Greek and Italian) seem to have deep, probably borrowed, metaphysical imagery that remains, nevertheless, pretty inaccessible in prose translation. More of interest are his number of early attempts at longer poems; L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, and the Masque are all essentially efforts at Spenserian pastoral dreams, at which Lycidas is the ultimate fulfillment. It's a strange bag, and I would even say that most of these poems aren't of interest, being formalist exercises that don't really inform the epic works at all except as retrospectively nascent precursors. It remains almost incredible to me that he could have written On Time, one the greatest lyric poems of all time, in this sea.
PARADISE REGAINED
Milton would kick out his guests if they spoke of this poem as an inferior to its predecessor; it seems to me good evidence of the total ineptitude of Milton scholarship that people fail to see that this is a consistent continuation of the epic. The prosody and language remain about equally strong (a little less martial, a little more star-gazing), and his width of interest -- grandiose visions, Satanic bombast, astral reverie at Christ and his Mother -- follows very consistently with the schema of Paradise Lost. Indeed, Milton's apologetic fervor seems stronger here than in PL, given that the sterner figure of Christ serves as a more accessible vantage point for trumpeting of the Divine than the wimpier Jesus of Paradise Lost or his imperious father; I think what upsets people about this poem is that it makes Satan look weak as he is defeated by the Christ, but it is so blindingly obvious that the charming Byronism of PL's Satan is an illusory state that I am almost in awe that academics, judging by what I've read of Milton scholarship, fall for this sort of trick ... or is it, perhaps, that Satanism has once again corrupted the academies?
SAMSON AGONISTES
It seemed to me that the purpose of Paradise Lost was a genuine epic, poetizing the order and grandeur of the divine cosmos, and that the supposedly ambiguous charm of Satan was nothing more than a genuine (and particularly successful) effort to show the charming surface that lays over a heart totally privated of the Good. Those who, however, insist on believing that Satan's rage against God is justified ought to read this poem instead, for it offers precisely this ambiguity. Whereas PL and PR had done their best to represent a divine viewpoint for its narration, this poem is firmly in the pagan caves. Samson resembles not only the ageing, leprous Job, but more greatly the Oedipus who dies at Colonus -- blinded, bitter, uncertain of how the divinities have left him so ruinous, stumbling towards the viewpoint that there is no God and that his ruin has been all self-caused. The poem sees Samson debating the remnants of his life with a string of passerbies, seeing the particular language of Milton reflection transmuted to a more agnostic, frightened vantage point; and its finale is not one of divine retribution but of an almost frighteningly pagan bloodbath in a very similar vein to that on which Racine's Iphegenie ends.
The notes in my edition apprised me of the struggles in Miltonic scholarship -- Goethe, supposedly, said of this poem that it was one of the closest approximations of authentic Greek tragedy ever made by moderns and, it seems, this has given rise to an endless slew of academics writing mediocre, constrained articles "pointing out" Christian elements within the text. Those who have a hard time seeing that it is a genuinely ancient-like tragedy, on account of its pre-salvation setting, told from an ultimately Christian perspective (to which the speakers are not privy, but the demiurgic narratorial structure is) are so off the mark that it is almost worth ignoring; but it should be noted that big Goethe understood that the Greeks were living, in motion, and that he would never say a deliberately anachronistic revival were authentic; rather, to employ the senibility of a classical drama while fully embracing modern knowledge would be the most genuine revival of them all. Instead, these academics feel a need to vaguely assert an overarching and uninformative descriptor of 'classical drama' or 'Christian drama', with seemingly negligible interest of what this is. Why these fellows spend their lives doing these pedantic, modular analyses, I'll never know ... or rather, see my comment above about academies ...
This poem, all the same, is doubly special on account of its divergeance from blank verse. Milton still writes in his typical iambics, but is very malleable with the feet, employs more feminine endings, often skips the initial syllable, and even uses anapestic substitutions much more often. You would think this might produce an irregular feeling, but consider Eliot's diagnosis of Milton's pentameters, that they are hardly lines in themselves but rather a pretext for him to employ long sentences spanning many lines irregularly, these being the base atoms of Milton's style. By freeing himself of the pentameter structure, the lines become more meaningful and forceful runs contrast with lighter trimeter/tetrameter feelings. Together with the already special subject matter, this produces some of Milton's finest writing of all.
July 24, 2019
[review only of Samson Agonistes (for now):]
I'm pretty new to Milton, other than reading little chunks of Paradise Lost back in college and just recently finally reading the whole thing. Maybe my professor told me to read it out loud back then? But I didn't. I feel like that's the big secret, maybe even more so for Samson Agonistes since it's a play. But Milton's language has such a flow and rhythm, it's like hearing it actually vibrating the air around you instead of materializing the words inside your head really activates it, enlivens it.
So. Read it aloud if you can. Maybe with a friend!
My other recommendation (not that you asked, yet I guess you are reading...) is to read a few old classic Greek plays first, since Milton is very consciously trying to pull that tradition forward. So, I recently read quite a few Euripides plays (especially the translations by Anne Carson, which are awesome) and having that template in your mind really helps. (And, frankly, Euripides is my recommendation. Something about how wild and strange his work is makes it a lot more appealing than some of the earlier old Greek stuff.)
And it's probably good to have the old Samson story from the Hebrew Bible near the front of your brain. It's in the book of Judges. Doesn't take long to read. Then you're well set up to enjoy this play, because you can see Milton taking a fixed story (like Euripides usually did) and choosing which pieces of it in a particular 24 hours to put onstage. Just make sure you marinate in the flow of it all, too. Out loud!
I'm pretty new to Milton, other than reading little chunks of Paradise Lost back in college and just recently finally reading the whole thing. Maybe my professor told me to read it out loud back then? But I didn't. I feel like that's the big secret, maybe even more so for Samson Agonistes since it's a play. But Milton's language has such a flow and rhythm, it's like hearing it actually vibrating the air around you instead of materializing the words inside your head really activates it, enlivens it.
So. Read it aloud if you can. Maybe with a friend!
My other recommendation (not that you asked, yet I guess you are reading...) is to read a few old classic Greek plays first, since Milton is very consciously trying to pull that tradition forward. So, I recently read quite a few Euripides plays (especially the translations by Anne Carson, which are awesome) and having that template in your mind really helps. (And, frankly, Euripides is my recommendation. Something about how wild and strange his work is makes it a lot more appealing than some of the earlier old Greek stuff.)
And it's probably good to have the old Samson story from the Hebrew Bible near the front of your brain. It's in the book of Judges. Doesn't take long to read. Then you're well set up to enjoy this play, because you can see Milton taking a fixed story (like Euripides usually did) and choosing which pieces of it in a particular 24 hours to put onstage. Just make sure you marinate in the flow of it all, too. Out loud!
Read
July 31, 2023The Psalms were the easiest to understand, followed by the Latin and Greek poems. The book got easier to understand as it went along.
June 4, 2025
best to ever do it
October 27, 2017
Probably the most complex piece of literature I have ever read. Nevertheless, its genius, simply pure genius. Milton is one of the most distinguished authors in all of literature- for good reason-and he did everything but disappoint. Milton provides narrative insights/interpretations that are simply unparalleled to anything but the Bible itself. I find his representation of Satan very interesting, and our English class definitely picked up on that, chiefly due to his eery representation of human nature. Milton is an absolute must for literature lovers and English majors/minors/lovers.
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August 11, 2016Finished Paradise Regained which was no where near as good as Paradise Lost. Still need to read Samson Agonistes.
February 22, 2026
Better than PL.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews