In this collection, esteemed poet and translator David R. Slavitt brings to life John Milton’s Latin poetry with deft, imaginative modern English translations. While Milton is recognized as one of the most learned English poets in history, his Latin poetry is less well known. Slavitt’s careful rendering brings Milton’s Latin poems—many written in his late teens—into the present. He keeps true to the style of the originals, showing Milton’s maturing poetic voice and the freedom he found working in Latin. On the Gunpowder Plot O, sly Guy Fawkes, you plotted against your king and the British lords, but did you intend to be kind and make up for your malice in this thing with at least a show of piety? Do we find an intention, perhaps, of sending the members of court up to the sky in a chariot made of fire the way Elijah traveled. Or do I distort the simple wickedness of your desire? Featuring an introduction by Gordon Teskey, this comprehensive English-language collection of Milton’s Latin poems pays due respect to a master. Poetry lovers, Milton fans, and scholars of either will welcome, enjoy, and learn from this work.

John Milton is, next to William Shakespeare, the most influential English poet, a writer whose work spans an incredible breadth of forms and subject matter. The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton celebrates this author’s genius in a thoughtfully assembled book that provides new modern-spelling versions of Milton’s texts, expert commentary, and a wealth of other features that will please even the most dedicated students of Milton’s canon. Edited by a trio of esteemed scholars, this volume is the definitive Milton for our time. In these pages you will find all of Milton’s verse, from masterpieces such as Paradise Lost–widely viewed as the finest epic poem in the English language–to shorter works such as the Nativity Ode, Lycidas,, A Masque and Samson Agonistes. Milton’s non-English language sonnets, verses, and elegies are accompanied by fresh translations by Gordon Braden. Among the newly edited and authoritatively annotated prose selections are letters, pamphlets, political tracts, essays such as Of Education and Areopagitica, and a generous portion of his heretical Christian Doctrine. These works reveal Milton’s passionate advocacy of controversial positions during the English Civil War and the Commonwealth and Restoration periods. With his deep learning and the sensual immediacy of his language, Milton creates for us a unique bridge to the cultures of classical antiquity and medieval and Renaissance Christianity. With this in mind, the editors give careful attention to preserving the vibrant energy of Milton’s verse and prose, while making the relatively unfamiliar aspects of his writing accessible to modern readers. Notes identify the old meanings and roots of English words, illuminate historical contexts–including classical and biblical allusions–and offer concise accounts of the author’s philosophical and political assumptions. This edition is a consummate work of modern literary scholarship.

This reading of Milton juxtaposes the poet's theology and Freud's account of the Oedipus complex in ways that yield both new understanding of Milton and a model for psychoanalytic interpretation of literature. The book ranges widely through the art and life of Milton, including extensive discussions of his theological irregularities and the significance, medical and symbolic, he assigned to his blindness. Kerrigan analyzes the oedipal aspect of Milton's religion; examines the nature of the Miltonic godhead; studies Milton's analogies linking human, angelic, and cosmic bodies; and explores Milton's symbolism of home. In a commanding demonstration, Kerrigan delineates how the great epic and the psyche of its author bestow meaning on each other.

Upending conventional scholarship on Milton and modernity, Lee Morrissey recasts Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes as narrating three alternative responses to a world in upheaval: adjustment, avoidance and antagonism. Through incisive engagement with narrative, form, and genre, Morrissey shows how each work, considered specifically as a fiction, grapples with the vicissitudes of a modern world characterised more by paradoxes, ambiguities, subversions and shifting temporalities than by any rigid historical periodization. The interpretations made possible by this book are as invaluable as they are counterintuitive, opening new definitions and stimulating avenues of research for Milton students and specialists, as well as for those working in the broader field of early modern studies. Morrissey invites us to rethink where Milton stands in relation to the greatest products of modernity, and in particular to that most modern of genres, the novel.

The Brightest Lights of the Christian Tradition St. Augustine, Thomas Merton, Fredrick Buechner, Evelyn Underhill, A.W. Tozer, G.K. Chesterton, Thomas More, Martin Luther King, Jr., Amy Carmichael, Simone Weil, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hildegard of Bingen, John Milton, Dorothy Day, Leo Tolstoy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and more. . . From nearly two thousand years of Christian writing comes Spiritual Classcs,fifty–two selections complete with a profile of each author, guided meditations for group and individual use, and reflections containing questions and exercises. Editors Richard Foster and Emilie Griffith offer their expertise by selecting inspirational writings and including their own commentary and recommendations for further guided reading and exploration.