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  • Published: 27 September 2007
  • ISBN: 9780140424416
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $21.00
Categories:

Selected Poems: Milton




A selection of Milton's poetry

The poems of John Milton (1608-74) have inspired readers for generations and the selection in this new edition spans his entire career, from his earliest works to the magnificent epics of his later life. The devotional ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, his first great poem, anticipates the probing religious questions of Paradise Lost. Works such as ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’ consider divisions of loyalties, while ‘A Masque’ (‘Comus’) explores Milton’s great theme of temptation, and the pastoral elegy ‘Lycidas’ contemplates mortality and the meaning of human life. This volume includes considerable selections from Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained - Milton’s late epics on the Fall of Man and Christ’s temptation in the wilderness - and the complete Samson Agonistes, in which the great hero undergoes a profound crisis of faith in his final hours.

  • Published: 27 September 2007
  • ISBN: 9780140424416
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $21.00
Categories:

Other books in the series

Maldoror and Poems
On Sparta
Love
Annals
Military Dispatches

About the author

John Milton

John Milton was born on 9 December 1608. He studied at St Paul's School and then at Christ's College, Cambridge. He wrote poetry in Latin and Italian as well as English and travelled in Italy between 1638 and 1639. He married Mary Powell in 1642 but their relationship quickly broke down and they lived apart until 1645. They had four children, three daughters and a son who died in infancy. During the Interregnum after the execution of Charles I, Milton worked for the civil service and wrote pamphlets in support of the new republic. He also began work on his masterpiece, Paradise Lost, as early as 1642. His first wife died in 1652 and he married again in 1656, although his second wife died not long afterwards in 1658. When the monarchy was restored in 1660 Milton was arrested but was released with a fine. In 1663 he married his third wife, Elizabeth Minshull and he is also thought to have finished Paradise Lost in this same year. He published the companion poem, Paradise Regained, in 1671.John Milton died on 8 November 1674.

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