Product Description
J. R. and Philip Milton present the first critical edition of John Locke's Essay concerning Toleration and a number of other writings on law and politics composed between 1667 and 1683. Although Locke never published any of these works himself they are of very great interest for students of his intellectual development because they are markedly different from the early works he wrote while at Oxford and show him working out ideas that were to appear in his mature political writings, the Two Treatises of Government and the Epistola de Tolerantia.

The Essay concerning Toleration was written in 1667, shortly after Locke had taken up residence in the household of his patron Lord Ashley, subsequently Earl of Shaftesbury. It has been in print since the nineteenth century, but this volume contains the first critical edition based on all the extant manuscripts; it also contains a detailed account of Locke's arguments and of the contemporary debates on comprehension and toleration. Also included are a number of shorter writings on church and state, including a short set of queries on Scottish church government (1668), Locke's notes on Samuel Parker (1669), and "Excommunication'"(1674).

The other two main works contained in this volume are rather different in character . One is a short tract on jury selection which was written at the time of Shaftesbury's imprisonment in 1681. The other is 'A Letter from a Person of Quality', a political pamphlet written by or for Shaftesbury in 1675 as part of his campaign against the Earl of Danby. This was published anonymously and is of disputed authorship; it was first attributed to Locke in 1720 and since then has occupied an uncertain position in the Locke canon. This volume contains the first critical edition based on contemporary printed editions and manuscripts and it includes a detailed account of the Letter's composition, authorship, and subsequent history.

This volume will be an invaluable resource for all historians of early modern philosophy, of legal, political, and religious thought, and of 17th century Britain. ... Read more

Product Description
The book has no illustrations or index. Purchasers are entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Subjects: Poetry / General; Poetry / General; Poetry / American / General; Poetry / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

could use a proofreader
The publishers intend to print large type editions for those who want/need them. This is admirable, but the execution is sloppy.

For example, line 57 of Lycidas in their large print edition reads:
"RHad ye been there, S...for what could that have done?"

The text (Viking Press edition) is actually:
"Had ye been there!- for what could that have done?"

The nonsensical extra capital letters, the omission of the exclamation point, and the insertion of an ellipsis all either change the sense of the text and/or are distracting and annoying or both.

The blurb on the back of the book is very funny(unintentionally, I'm guessing):
"It is a spectacular collection of poems and songs in which Milton's particular dramatic and natural chic is evident."
Milton? chic??
... Read more

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This collection of eight essays employs a Christian lens to examine works by John Milton, Alexander Pope, William Blake, Lord Byron, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Herman Melville, William Golding, and Bob Dylan. ... Read more

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About John Milton-

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
Originally published in 1908 as a reprint from the earliest printed copies of the several poems, and edited after the original texts. The 1645 volume of "Minor Poems" has been printed entire; then follow in order "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regain'd" and "Samson Agonistes." An Appendix contains Specimen of Milton's spelling etc.Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Home Farm Books are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork. ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishings Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the worlds literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

Product Description
"THE INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY PROFESSOR BUSH ARE MODELS OF THEIR KIND .. A REALLY DISTINGUISHED EDITION OF MILTON" - ALAXANDER M WITHERSPOON, YALE UNIVERSITY. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Well=chosen selection for reading on the road
Nothing tops the complete works (including the prose) but this works well when you can't carry several thousand pages around with you. Marginalia may be a challenge, but that is why God invented yellow stickies. Decent binding for a paperback, great for casual reading and travel.

Uggh
Had to purchase this for school.Hated the book but the price was right.

This book's title describes it well
Purchased this book after checking a copy out of the library. It is the perfect size to carry around and read on the go - at coffee shops, on trips, etc. There are no footnotes, just the texts themselves, but those are ample and well selected, representing a good range of Milton's works written throughout his life. It is exactly what it claims to be: a stripped down, bare-bones collection of Milton's most important works, and as that, it works exceedingly well. One of the two books I would bring if marooned on a desert island.

The great poet's greatest work
This anthology is ably introduced and annotated by Douglas Bush. The poems are put in their historical context, and in relation to Milton's overall development.The anthology contains 'Lycidas' ' Paradise Lost' and 'Paradise Regained.'It also contains some of Milton's great prose works.
Milton is for many the second English poet after Shakespeare. If today he seems less accessible than other giants of English poetry, primarily Chaucer and Wordsworth his work nonetheless has a majesty and depth and a musicality which at times overwhelms.

Good Collection, Excellent Commentary, But No Footnotes
The Portable Milton has been in print more than fifty years. The collection is quite good, containing all of John Milton's major poems and most of his minor poems. Unlike some collections, the long poems Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, and Comus are not abridged. The editor, Douglas Bush, has translated the few poems that Milton published in Latin. Milton's prose works include Of Education, Areopagitica, and three autobiographical essays.

In my copy (23rd printing, 1974) the font size is quite acceptable and easy to read. Reading Milton can be challenging and a major drawback to this collection is the absence of footnotes. However, the text does include a helpful 25-page glossary of less familiar words and proper names.

The 28-page introduction by Professor Bush is excellent and provides a firm historical, political, and religious foundation to the works of Milton. The discussion of Milton's evolving religious beliefs, especially as reflected in his epic Paradise Lost, was quite good.

You may want to consider alternative collections. Other choices, arranged by price, are below.

The Dover Thrift Edition, titled Selected Poems, is a bargain. Excluding the lengthy epic poems Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, this little book provides nearly all of John Milton's poetry that you are likely to encounter, including the 45-page dramatic poem Samson Agonistes. The footnotes are sparse.

I also like Selected Poetry (World's Classics, 1997) edited by Jonathan Goldberg and Stephen Orgel. This inexpensive book offers a nearly complete collection of John Milton's English poetry. The price is low, the font size is adequate, and best of all it offers extensive annotation, a real asset to most readers. The lengthy Paradise Lost has been moderately abridged.

Looking for an outstanding edition of Paradise Lost?I highly recommend the Norton Critical Edition of Paradise Lost, superbly edited by Scott Elledge. Examine the reader reviews and you will probably buy a copy.

I am not personally familiar with The Complete Poems and Major Prose of John Milton, edited by Merritt Y. Hughes, but it appears worth investigating. The reader reviews are quite favorable, but it is somewhat expensive. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A superb, user-friedly edition
Paradise Lost is my favorite work in the English language, and this is my favorite edition of it (I have quite a few).The editor, Roy Flannagan,does a superb job with the footnotes.They address just about everyquestion a modern reader might have, provide plenty of historical contextand explain in detail the zillions of references and names that someone whois not intimately familiar with all of Milton's sources (among them theBible and ancient Greek and Roman mythology) will have a hard timeunderstanding.Flannagan's infectious enthusiasm for this poem comesacross loud and clear, and he never condescends to readers that lack a PhD,like Merritt Hughes does in his scholarly edition of Paradise Lost. Finally, the page layout of the Flannagan edition makes reading and notetaking real easy.In sum, this is hands down the best edition of ParadiseLost.

Classical Epic poem
Very hard to read if you are non English speaking man. But it is very interesting to read the classical masterpiece of 17-th century. So if you really interested in such things, don't think simply get it. ... Read more

Product Description
John Milton (1608-74) has a strong claim to be considered the greatest English poet after Skakespeare. His early poems, collected and published in 1645, include the much loved pair L'Allegro and Il Penseroso ('the cheerful man and the thoughtful man'), Lycidas (his great elegy on a fellow poet) and Comus (the one masque which is still read today).
When the Civil War began Milton abandoned poetry for politics and wrote a series of pamphlets in defence of the Parliamentary party, then in defence of the execution of Charles I: these include his great defence of the freedom of the press, Areopagitica.
In the course of this work he lost his sight, and was blind for the last twenty years of his life. During this time he wrote his two great epics, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, and his retelling of the story of Samson as a Greek tragedy.
This edition contains all his poems in English, with introduction and notes by Laurence Lerner (formerly Professor of English, University of Sussex) ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A Rare Find!
It's very rare to encounter Milton's works in the original Englosh!Almost nobody speaks, reads or writes Englosh anymore, and it's delightful to think that Milton might have been one of my drinking buddies!

Greatest English writer
This book is a delight.Great for anyone who loves English literature.Possibly the greatest man ever to write in English; rivalled only by Shakespeare.I'm not much of a fan of poetry, but this takes my breath away.Only quibble: for a text this wonderful and timeless, I would have expected a better presentation.The paperback of this book has a cheap binding, and is printed on what feels like pulp paper. ... Read more

Product Description
General Books publication date: 2009Original publication date: 1822Original Publisher: press of C. WhittinghamSubjects: Literary Criticism / PoetryPoetry / GeneralPoetry / American / GeneralPoetry / English, Irish, Scottish, WelshNotes: This is an OCR reprint of the original rare book. There may be typos or missing text and there are no illustrations.When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. You can also preview the book there. ... Read more

Product Description
Milton's Words approaches John Milton in both an old and a new way, focusing on his genius with words: keywords - the keys to atext or a theory; words of sexual avoidance and distress; words of abuse; words of privilege because 'Scripture'; big learned words; and cunning little words, easily overlooked. After a short account of Milton's life as a writer, Patterson guides us through most of the poetry and polemical prose, all too often kept in separate compartments. She shows how new challenges and crises required shifts in vocabulary, as well as changes in Milton's views.

What do Milton's words look like when we acknowledge their freight of personal and political history; when we track them from text to text; when we consider not only the big, important, learned words but also the very small ones, such as 'perhaps', which Milton deployed with consummate skill at some crucial moments in both poetry and prose, or the phrase 'he who', which replicates the Latinate 'ille qui', but to which Milton gives a psychological twist; when we consider not only word frequency, but infrequency, uniqueness or near uniqueness, as a signal of Milton's interest in a word; when we tackle these issues in the Latin texts for which there is not, as yet, a concordance; when we consider the possibility that certain words gain or lose value for Milton as he proceeds through his writer's life, and that certain words become keywords to a particular text, as 'book' becomes to Areopagitica; when we reconsider the question of Milton's coinages not from the stern legalistic perspective as to whether he should have made them, but why he needed them? No one person could complete all these tasks, and nobody would wish to read a book that appeared to have completed them. Understanding Milton's words is, and should remain, a work in progress.

But close attention to Milton's words is not all that this book offers. It tells a slightly different story about Milton himself than the ones we have been used to. Starting with an abbreviated 'writer's life', it explains the shape of Milton's writing career, the life-long tension between his literary ambitions and the pressure of exhilarating political circumstances. The Milton you will find here walked no straight path from his Cambridge degree to the epic he had been talking of writing when he was still at university, but instead cut his teeth as a writer in an entirely different field, political controversy. The effect on his vocabulary of his campaign to reform his country's church government and its divorce laws was galvanic, not least because he had to reconstitute his own image from that of a shy and bookish person to that of a crusader. He discovered that he enjoyed not only verbal conflict, but also mudslinging, and rude words became part of his arsenal in his very first prose tract. 'Marriage' and 'divorce', on the other hand, became loaded words for Milton for personal reasons, and he developed a new set of verbal resources, which Patterson calls 'words of avoidance', to help him tackle the subject.He never got over the experience of writing the divorce tracts. It was still on his mind when at the end of his life he revised his Latin treatise on theology, De Doctrina Christiana.

Then, for about a decade, he was called upon to justify the Long Parliament's execution of Charles I, which forced him to come to terms with the political keywords of his generation, words such as 'king', 'liberty', 'tyranny', and 'the people'.When the republican experiment collapsed on the death of Oliver Cromwell, after one last brave salvo against the restoration of the monarchy Milton retired back into the role of private intellectual and poet. This we all know; but because the poetry and the prose have been segregated for so long, and still tend to be read as separate enterprises, we have not tended to track Milton's favorite political words into the great poems, where, as we perhaps unwillingly will see, they change their valence.In general, though it is impossible to do justice to all of Milton's feats of word use and arrangement, this book will tell a complete tale of Milton the man; his psychological trajectory as well as that more formal notion,his 'character'; his mistakes as well as his masterpieces. ... Read more

Product Description
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

Product Description
Written just after the Restoration period in England, Milton's blank verse epic, Paradise Lost, dramatized man's "fortunate fall" from grace and earned him a permanent place in the canon.

This title, John Milton, part of Chelsea House Publishers’ Modern Critical Views series, examines the major works of John Milton through full-length critical essays by expert literary critics. In addition, this title features a short biography on John Milton, a chronology of the author’s life, and an introductory essay written by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

On this book (and a brief reply to Abdiel Agonistes)
Bloom is the editor of this book of essays concerning the poetry of John Milton. Students or casual readers of the book will both profit from and enjoy them.Milton was a great poet,and should be understood on his on ground, on his on terms, and the essays will facilitate such understanding.

Please do read Abdiel Agonistes review, but keep in mind that his view is biased by his religious beliefs; and his misconceptions of great poets such as Whitman and Goethe as well as his scurrilous (and discredited) view of Modernism should be taken with a grain of salt. ... Read more