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Title: Paradise Lost (Penguin Classics)
ISBN: 0140424393
Author:
John Milton
Publicate Date: 2003-04-29
Publish: 2003-04-29
List Price: $12.00
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Paperback
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1: Rise and Fall
First off, let me say that we're not talking here about the famous Qi gong instructor named John Milton. We're talking about the famous 17th-century English poet who wrote _Paradise Lost_ and _Paradise Regained_, two of the most wonderfully overlong Christian poems in the history of Western literature.
Your English teacher will tell you that _Paradise Lost_ "narrates the story of Adam and Eve's disobedience, explains how and why it happened, and places the story within the larger context of Satan's rebellion and Jesus' resurrection." And you know that can't be far wrong, because SparkNotes says the exact same thing.
But the main reason everyone should read Milton's grand epic is that it contains certain secrets about prayer.
In PL, Milton reminds us how important it is, when we pray, to be absolutely specific. The Lord has a strange, often disturbing, sense of humour (PL, books I-XII). If you leave Him wiggle room, He will answer your prayer in a way you never intended, and then say it was your own damned fault, because your prayer contained seven types of ambiguity.
John Milton writes from experience. Example: Almost every time a good-looking woman passed within view of John Milton, he suffered an involuntary erection. Daniel of the Old Testament might well have suffered such a condition without complaining, but John Milton found it onerous. John was both a Puritan and a student of Saint Augustine. He was not happy when he suffered an erection, he hated it, and he especially resented the women who made that thing happen to him.
In a Latin letter to his friend, George Wither, John Milton reports that, in his youth, he would sometimes see a pretty woman even in his dreams at night, and suffer, not just an erection, but the whole nine yards, up to and including a nocturnal emission; which he trained himself to handle according to Scripture, thereby to purify himself (Deut. 23:10); but sometimes he was unable to wait that long before he handled it, which filled his soul full of Puritan remorse and self-reproach.
At age 33, the poet took to wife a 16-year-old lolita named Mary Powell; and you may already have guessed the reason why, which is that she gave him an erection -- more accurately, she gave him "one damned erection after another," without remission. (Giving John Milton an erection was not the girl's conscious intent, but it just happened to him, every time they met.) And since Christian marriage is Saint Paul's only approved method whereby to deal with that kind of torment, John Milton (being an honourable man) thought it best to marry the girl (1 Cor. 7:9).
Frailty, thy name is woman! After two years of marriage - after just two years of witnessing those insufferable erections that could not be beaten down, or at least, not for long - the poet's young Puritan bride ran away and skipped back home to live with her mother, Mrs. Anne Powell, who likewise gave John an erection; which is why John Milton resented his mother-in-law as well as his estranged wife.
Those were the hardest years of the poet's life - nothing but a daily struggle against involuntary erections, yet here he was, trapped in a loveless marriage to a barely pubescent teenager who lived with her entirely-too-attractive mother. Which is partly why John Milton wrote those four revolutionary Christian pamphlets, correcting Moses' and Jesus' hardline policy on divorce (Mark 10:11-12).
In his Latin correspondence, some of which is preserved in the Bodleian Library, John Milton reports that he was fine when alone in his study, or when hobnobbing with Parliamentarians, or even when having a hasty pudding, or a figgy one, over at the Inns of Court; but let just one good-looker cross his path, showing good ankle between the hem of her dress and the top of her shoe, and it was boing! - instant erection, just like a spring-loaded mechanical device; causing John to exclaim bitterly, "Oh, God, please, not again! Save me from this penal fire!"
It even happened to him once when Oliver Cromwell's wife, Elizabeth Bourchier Cromwell, bent over to pick up a handkerchief that had fallen to the floor. On that occasion there was a lamentable accident ("an hard mishap" [verbatim quote]) with John's ordinarily modest codpiece - an incident so humiliating that John never even wrote a poem about it, although he did apologise, profusely, to Oliver Cromwell, and to Mrs. Cromwell, who saw the whole thing, and then fainted. (John at the time was employed as Cromwell's Latin secretary.)
By the way: It was modesty, not arrogance, that moved John Milton, after that embarrassing incident, to wear a baggy codpiece, with plenty of wiggle room.
Which brings me back to the beginning, when I was explaining why you should give the Lord no wiggle room when you pray: John Milton took his problem to the Lord in prayer, stating in his journal, "Father, I pray Thee, let me not suffer a stiffe joynt when I see a beautifull woman."
And here's how the Lord answered that prayer, in 1651: He struck John Milton blind.
At first, John thought that his blindness was a punishment for his own bad behaviour - which is how that whole thing got going, in Anglo-American Christianity, about how, if you are a boy who does what John Milton used to do, it could make you go blind. But God revealed to John, by means of a dream, that his blindness was actually an answer to his own prayers ??- because the poet had said, "Father, let me not suffer a stiff joint when I see a beautiful woman."
John Milton then said, "Lord, that is not what I meant, at all" - but it was too late to change the outcome, because the prayer was already answered.
The erections that John Milton suffered in the years 1651-1674, and there were many, even after the Lord answered his prayer, were not from seeing a beautiful woman, it was actually because John had a condition that modern physicians call PSAS ("Persistent Sexual Arousal Syndrome"). So the chronic "stiffe joynt" problem was not really the women's fault, and it never was; but John Milton never knew that. Even when he wrote Paradise Lost (by dictation, from 1652-1667), John was still under the impression that women, seen or unseen, were to blame for his condition; which is why he makes all of those snide remarks in blank verse about your mother, Eve, in Books IV-V and IX-X of Paradise Lost. Because whenever he pictured Eve in his mind's eye, it was boing! - the same old problem. And there would come no more blank verse to his head for the next twenty minutes or so, until things settled down. John Milton hated that.
But it all turned out for the best: if God had not answered John Milton's prayer in that unusual way, by blinding him, Paradise Lost might never have been completed, and sold to the publisher, Sam Simmons, in 1667, for ??5 - which was a tidy sum for a religious poem during the decadent Restoration era.
It was while writing the early books of Paradise Lost that John was introduced to Katherine, a ship captain's daughter, a fat woman whom he had never seen (because he was blind); whom he nonetheless married in 1656, but not for the same old reason as before: John asked fat Kate to marry him (a.) because he needed secretarial assistance with Paradise Lost, and (b.) because Katherine did not have the same pernicious effect on him as Mary Powell and her mother Anne had done. John could dictate blank verse to Kate all night long without feeling so much as a tingle down there.
Kate's surname was Woodcock. Beelzebub made a little joke about that: he said, "The Lord finally gave John Milton just what he always wanted."
- L.
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2: The Epic Poem of the English Language
John Milton's "Paradise Lost" is one of the all-time classics of English literature. The epic poem begins with Satan just having been expelled from Heaven. Adam and Eve are tempted in the Garden of Eden, and fall. Before the two are expelled from Eden, Adam has revealed to him some of the major events of the Old and New Testaments, culminating in the Second Coming of Christ. The epic has enthralled readers for well over three centuries.
One thing that must be borne in mind when reading this work is that Milton's theology was not orthodox Christian theology, but Arianism, as he denied the Trinity and believed that Christ was not eternal, but created by God the Father. Also, the seventeenth century English is difficult to plow through. However, by forcing the reader to reflect on the origin of evil and to consider what they believe about the concept of original sin, "Paradise Lost" proves to be worth the effort one must make in reading it.
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3: Possibly the Best Edition Out There
I have read "Paradise Lost" four times, and took no less than three semesters on it at university. This was the edition we used to work. Modernised spelling, coherent punctuation (plus variations of it in the notes), good introduction, and enormous work in the notes; this edition has all you need for a good reading of the epic poem.
As to the poem itself, some people are hard on it for all the wrong reasons. Remember that it is a 17th century poem, that English was not exactly similar as it is today, and that there are many, many words which were first used in English in "Paradise Lost". Milton was innovative with words, and he gave English new words, and expressions, such as the most famous "all Hell broke loose", which was first uttered in "Paradise Lost".
A poem like this cannot be read without good notes, and this is what this edition has to offer. Notes aren't enough, though, they have to be good, and in this edition, they are. The poem itself is not burdened by the numbers of the notes, because there are so many, the editor decided not to show them in the text per se, but at the end of the book, you will always have the reference, the lines, which the notes are about.
As to the poem itself, if you don't know it, you certainly know of the story of the Fall of Man, Adam and Eve, and the rebellion of Satan in Heaven. I'll only say that Milton's God is one seriously problematic figure in the poem, and that it caused centuries of academic discussion as to whether Milton's God is a good God or a devilish one, whether "Paradise Lost" was truly a "myth", in the old sense of a story which explains why we're here and how it got to be, or whether it was an attack on Christianity. Scholars still discuss this today, so make your own mind if you can!
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4: Did finish it yet
Penguin Classic Editions of any book are truly great. One should also note that Signet Classics is also Penguin but this version should only be brought if Penguin Classics is not available. Of course, one has to evaluate one's purpose for the book but Penguin always has notes and good Intros for their books.
I purchased this book for a paper in which I had to choose a chapter and write about it. This version is really clear but is written as Milton would have written it so some of the old English is annoying but there are notes and major parts. The only problem I have with this edition is that there are no chapter titles so you really do not know what each cahpter is about unless you read it.
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5: A Humbling Triumph of Emotion, Spirituality and Despair.
One of the many results of the increased literacy rate is the ability for every Tom, Dick or Harry to consider themselves literary experts and to opine on the supposed faults of great literature, presuming that it should serve merely their basest pleasures. The correct response to such vulgarity is to rebuke, letting them make their solitary way till one greater man restore them. Before the charge of arrogance is levelled against me, I must too opine that this attitude of literary snobbery should be applied to each one of us when we approach the genius of Milton and Paradise Lost, relenting to the sensation of humility as this epic poem enters our mind. Only by reading in such a frame of mind, can one truly appreciate and enjoy the poetry of Milton.
Paradise Lost is Milton's attempt to recount the debacle of Satan in Heaven, and his role in the Fall of Humanity. While Milton grandly presents his work as an attempt to `justify the ways of God to men' regarding His motivations for our expulson from Paradise, the focus of Paradise Lost is firmly upon Satan and his emotional turmoil at losing Heaven, only to see a creature of dirt replace him as God's focus. From a Catholic perspective, one of the faults of Milton is that his anthropomorphism of the devil is almost too convincing, making Satan appear as a tragic, almost pathetic figure, rather than the merciless deceiver that he is. That is not to say that Milton portrays the devil in a positive frame, but attempts to offer reasons of insecurity, envy and self-righteous hostility for Satan's path of destruction; all too human traits, as many readers will find disconcerting.
As some have noted, while one's grasp and love of the English language should improve at the behest of Milton's poetry, it is unlikely that one will find any theological inspiration from this work. Heresies abound in Paradise Lost; hardly surprising due to the unorthodox religious convictions of Milton. Without condoning such-in my conviction-wicked ideas, one should attempt to read Milton, not as a theological treatise or an attempt to historically describe the Fall, but as a courageous attempt to venture into the midst of the spiritual, the power of emotion and the capability of both unto despair.
A classic which all will do well to read.
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