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Paradise Lost (Norton Critical Editions)
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Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
Author: John Milton
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
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Our Price:
You Save: $ 15.65 ( 100% )
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
Author: John Milton
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Average Customer Rating:
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Paradise Lost (Norton Critical Editions) Description
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 821.4
EAN: 9780393962932
ISBN: 0393962938
Label: W. W. Norton & Company
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 688
Publication Date: 1992-12
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Studio: W. W. Norton & Company
Dewey Decimal Number: 821.4
EAN: 9780393962932
ISBN: 0393962938
Label: W. W. Norton & Company
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 688
Publication Date: 1992-12
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Studio: W. W. Norton & Company
Editorial Review of Paradise Lost (Norton Critical Editions)
Customer Reviews of Paradise Lost (Norton Critical Editions)
Customer Rating: 
Review Summary: A Travesty
Review: Teskey believes that the punctuation of the two editions of the poem to appear in Milton's lifetime has `no authority' (p. xii) as the blind poet left the punctuation to be decided by the person taking dictation. `I have therefore punctuated as lightly as possible, that is, only where for lack of a comma the reader would take a wrong turn and be forced to go back' (ib.).
This sounds innocuous, though one may doubt if Milton would have wished to preserve his readers from wrong turns that have to be corrected. In any case, Teskey's treatment of the punctuation does not correspond at all to the programme he announces here. Far from punctuating lightly, he mutiplies full stops, clogging the progress of the poem, and often cutting Milton's sentences into bleeding ungrammatical segments.
He very frequently adds other punctuation marks where there are none in the original, and sometimes the effect of these is to obscure or distort the sense. He puts a comma in the middle of I, 9: `In the beginning, how the heav'ns and earth', creating the confusing impression that `in the beginning' goes with `That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed' (I, 8), whereas the absence of the comma makes clear that it does with the following words as in Genesis 1:1. He puts full stops where the 1674 texts has semi-colons, sometimes bringing the poetry to an abrupt half and breaking its rhythm, as in I, 34: `Th'infernal serpent. He it was whose guile'; the abrupt three-word sentence is not Miltonic style. The full stop introduced in I, 78 leaves the following three lines isolated even though they do not form a sentence:
He soon discerns. And welt'ring by his side
One next himself in pow'r and next in crime,
Long after known in Palestine and named
Beelzebub. (I, 78-81)
Milton is a grammatical writer, who does not leave incomplete sentences lying about. Beelzebub is the object of the verb `discerns', from which it is here brutally cut off.
There are some rare exclamation marks in the 1674 text, as in I, 75: `O how unlike the place from which they fell!' Teskey applies exclamation marks lavishly, giving a cartoon-like emphasis to Milton's lines. Examples: `Sad task!' (IX, 13)He even introduces italics for emphasis, something liable to alter radically the rhythm and sense of a passage.
So much the rather thou, celestial Light,
Shine inward and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate. _There_ plant eyes. All mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight. (III, 52-4)
The 1674 text has:
So much the rather thou Celestial light
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight. (III, 52-4)
Notice that by dividing the passage into three sentences, Teskey connects the closing `that I may see' only with the purging of mist, not with the more crucial `shine inward' and `there plant eyes'. The italicized `there' is meaningless, since it suggests that the Celestial light might be planting eyes elsewhere instead.
I could go on and on about Teskey's rushed revamping of Milton. I urge teachers NOT to used this flawed edition; Lewalski's edition with the original punctuation (Blackwell, 2007) or the richly annotated edition of Alistair Fowler are vastly preferable.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: !!!VERVE!!!
Review: what joy to read galaxian epics, large in their characters, profound in their language, jumbo-gigantic in their theme! for this work concerns nothing more than the salvation of mankind, the source of all our toxica, the origins of reality's thrash of contradiction, decapitation of sense, the justice of God's infinite bewilderment and a host of other themes, some limpid, some latent. yet the true irony of this story, although milton eventually loses interest in him after his hallow triumph is greeted in inferno with the hiss of snakes, is that the author's sympathies, obsessions and fascination lies most in the character of satan! for did not milton jail-suffer at the hands of the restoration of the house of stuart? the blind english word-smith thus explores in depth this cosmic character of rebellion! for he himself most likely also from time to time longed to attack authority, shirk government decrees and restore to power the creed that he thought would best help mankind rose-flourish and ivory-prosper! here we witness satan's frustration, his nails of soul, his menace of catastrophe! here we read of satan's inappeasable torrent of rats as he witnesses adam in the garden, content, at ease, pax surrounding him and satan thus languishes, yearning for the former splendo-times he passed in celestium. and when adam does finally eat of the apple and is thus exiled from eden's rapture - what hiṛshimum! what blight! for he laments his fall from grace in a torrent of mental cacophony and quickly sets about to blame eve for his slither among adders! but the work's most rubylicious feature is its language! how rarely do we encounter whole stories written in iambic pentameter verse! and milton embellishes his cosmic tale with all sorts of unexpected syntax, rioting images and flaxen parallels!
author of Lorelei Pursued and Wrestles with God
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Classic work
Review: Of Man's first disobedience and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till on greater Man
Restore us and regain the blissful seat
Sing, Heavenly Muse...
Not a lot people know that 'Paradise Lost' has as a much lesser known companion piece 'Paradise Regained'; of course, it was true during Milton's time as it is today that the more harrowing and juicy the story, the better it will likely be remembered and received.
This is not to cast any aspersion on this great poem, however. It has been called, with some justification, the greatest English epic poem. The line above, the first lines of the first book of the poem, is typical of the style throughout the epic, in vocabulary and syntax, in allusiveness. The word order tends toward the Latinate, with the object coming first and the verb coming after.
Milton follows many classical examples by personifying characters such as Death, Chaos, Mammon, and Sin. These characters interact with the more traditional Christian characters of Adam, Eve, Satan, various angels, and God. He takes as his basis the basic biblical text of the creation and fall of humanity (thus, 'Paradise Lost'), which has taken such hold in the English-speaking world that many images have attained in the popular mind an almost biblical truth to them (in much the same way that popular images of Hell owe much to Dante's Inferno). The text of Genesis was very much in vogue in the mid-1600s (much as it is today) and Paradise Lost attained an almost instant acclaim.
John Milton was an English cleric, a protestant who nonetheless had a great affinity for catholic Italy, and this duality of interests shows in much of his creative writing as well as his religious tracts. Milton was nicknamed 'the divorcer' in his early career for writing a pamphlet that supported various civil liberties, including the right to obtain a civil divorce on the grounds of incompatibility, a very unpopular view for the day. Milton held a diplomatic post under the Commonwealth, and wrote defenses of the governments action, including the right of people to depose and dispose of a bad king.
Paradise Lost has a certain oral-epic quality to it, and for good reason. Milton lost his eyesight in 1652, and thus had to dictate the poem to several different assistants. Though influenced heavily by the likes of Virgil, Homer, and Dante, he differentiated himself in style and substance by concentrating on more humanist elements.
Say first -- for Heaven hides nothing from thy view,
Nor the deep tract of Hell -- say first what cause
Moved our grand Parents, in that happy state,
Favoured of Heaven so highly, to fall off
From their Creator and transgress his will,
For one restraint, lords of the world besides?
Milton drops us from the beginning into the midst of the action, for the story is well known already, and proceeds during the course of the books (Milton's original had 10, but the traditional epic had 12 books, so some editions broke books VII and X into two books each) to both push the action forward and to give developing background -- how Satan came to be in Hell, after the war in heaven a description that includes perhaps the currently-most-famous line:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition though in hell:
Better to reign in hell, that serve in heav'n.
(Impress your friends by knowing that this comes from Book I, lines 261-263 of Paradise Lost, rather than a Star Trek episode!)
The imagery of warfare and ambition in the angels, God's wisdom and power and wrath, the very human characterisations of Adam and Eve, and the development beyond Eden make a very compelling story, done with such grace of language that makes this a true classic for the ages. The magnificence of creation, the darkness and empty despair of hell, the manipulativeness of evil and the corruptible innocence of humanity all come through as classic themes. The final books of the epic recount a history of humanity, now sinful, as Paradise has been lost, a history in tune with typical Renaissance renderings, which also, in Milton's religious convictions, will lead to the eventual destruction of this world and a new creation.
A great work that takes some effort to comprehend, but yields great rewards for those who stay the course.
This edition includes more than 50 pages of Milton's other poetry, including sonnets; there are also extensive sections of the KJV biblical text that directly relates to themes in Paradise Lost. Dozens of essays of literary criticism, from the likes of Voltaire, Dryden, Blake, Keats and Wordsworth as well as contemporary commentators such as Bloom, Frye and Adams complete this critical Norton edition.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: imake a point of reading this once a year.
Review: a riveting book for the philosophy of good and evil
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: The Best Work of Literature in the English Language
Review: Milton's "Paradise Lost" is the best work of literature in the English language, bar none. Christians and non-Christians alike should marvel at the vision presented by Milton. He is not a Satanist, as the Romantics would have you believe. Indeed, he is a devout Christian. This is what makes the work so extraordinary. Milton's vision of the astral world invokes various responses from the reader, all of them genuine and some contradictory. No matter who you are or what you believe, you will thoroughly enjoy this imaginary look into the events surrounding the fall of Lucifer and the beginnings of man in the Garden of Eden.
Review Summary: A Travesty
Review: Teskey believes that the punctuation of the two editions of the poem to appear in Milton's lifetime has `no authority' (p. xii) as the blind poet left the punctuation to be decided by the person taking dictation. `I have therefore punctuated as lightly as possible, that is, only where for lack of a comma the reader would take a wrong turn and be forced to go back' (ib.).
This sounds innocuous, though one may doubt if Milton would have wished to preserve his readers from wrong turns that have to be corrected. In any case, Teskey's treatment of the punctuation does not correspond at all to the programme he announces here. Far from punctuating lightly, he mutiplies full stops, clogging the progress of the poem, and often cutting Milton's sentences into bleeding ungrammatical segments.
He very frequently adds other punctuation marks where there are none in the original, and sometimes the effect of these is to obscure or distort the sense. He puts a comma in the middle of I, 9: `In the beginning, how the heav'ns and earth', creating the confusing impression that `in the beginning' goes with `That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed' (I, 8), whereas the absence of the comma makes clear that it does with the following words as in Genesis 1:1. He puts full stops where the 1674 texts has semi-colons, sometimes bringing the poetry to an abrupt half and breaking its rhythm, as in I, 34: `Th'infernal serpent. He it was whose guile'; the abrupt three-word sentence is not Miltonic style. The full stop introduced in I, 78 leaves the following three lines isolated even though they do not form a sentence:
He soon discerns. And welt'ring by his side
One next himself in pow'r and next in crime,
Long after known in Palestine and named
Beelzebub. (I, 78-81)
Milton is a grammatical writer, who does not leave incomplete sentences lying about. Beelzebub is the object of the verb `discerns', from which it is here brutally cut off.
There are some rare exclamation marks in the 1674 text, as in I, 75: `O how unlike the place from which they fell!' Teskey applies exclamation marks lavishly, giving a cartoon-like emphasis to Milton's lines. Examples: `Sad task!' (IX, 13)He even introduces italics for emphasis, something liable to alter radically the rhythm and sense of a passage.
So much the rather thou, celestial Light,
Shine inward and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate. _There_ plant eyes. All mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight. (III, 52-4)
The 1674 text has:
So much the rather thou Celestial light
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight. (III, 52-4)
Notice that by dividing the passage into three sentences, Teskey connects the closing `that I may see' only with the purging of mist, not with the more crucial `shine inward' and `there plant eyes'. The italicized `there' is meaningless, since it suggests that the Celestial light might be planting eyes elsewhere instead.
I could go on and on about Teskey's rushed revamping of Milton. I urge teachers NOT to used this flawed edition; Lewalski's edition with the original punctuation (Blackwell, 2007) or the richly annotated edition of Alistair Fowler are vastly preferable.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: !!!VERVE!!!
Review: what joy to read galaxian epics, large in their characters, profound in their language, jumbo-gigantic in their theme! for this work concerns nothing more than the salvation of mankind, the source of all our toxica, the origins of reality's thrash of contradiction, decapitation of sense, the justice of God's infinite bewilderment and a host of other themes, some limpid, some latent. yet the true irony of this story, although milton eventually loses interest in him after his hallow triumph is greeted in inferno with the hiss of snakes, is that the author's sympathies, obsessions and fascination lies most in the character of satan! for did not milton jail-suffer at the hands of the restoration of the house of stuart? the blind english word-smith thus explores in depth this cosmic character of rebellion! for he himself most likely also from time to time longed to attack authority, shirk government decrees and restore to power the creed that he thought would best help mankind rose-flourish and ivory-prosper! here we witness satan's frustration, his nails of soul, his menace of catastrophe! here we read of satan's inappeasable torrent of rats as he witnesses adam in the garden, content, at ease, pax surrounding him and satan thus languishes, yearning for the former splendo-times he passed in celestium. and when adam does finally eat of the apple and is thus exiled from eden's rapture - what hiṛshimum! what blight! for he laments his fall from grace in a torrent of mental cacophony and quickly sets about to blame eve for his slither among adders! but the work's most rubylicious feature is its language! how rarely do we encounter whole stories written in iambic pentameter verse! and milton embellishes his cosmic tale with all sorts of unexpected syntax, rioting images and flaxen parallels!
author of Lorelei Pursued and Wrestles with God
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Classic work
Review: Of Man's first disobedience and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till on greater Man
Restore us and regain the blissful seat
Sing, Heavenly Muse...
Not a lot people know that 'Paradise Lost' has as a much lesser known companion piece 'Paradise Regained'; of course, it was true during Milton's time as it is today that the more harrowing and juicy the story, the better it will likely be remembered and received.
This is not to cast any aspersion on this great poem, however. It has been called, with some justification, the greatest English epic poem. The line above, the first lines of the first book of the poem, is typical of the style throughout the epic, in vocabulary and syntax, in allusiveness. The word order tends toward the Latinate, with the object coming first and the verb coming after.
Milton follows many classical examples by personifying characters such as Death, Chaos, Mammon, and Sin. These characters interact with the more traditional Christian characters of Adam, Eve, Satan, various angels, and God. He takes as his basis the basic biblical text of the creation and fall of humanity (thus, 'Paradise Lost'), which has taken such hold in the English-speaking world that many images have attained in the popular mind an almost biblical truth to them (in much the same way that popular images of Hell owe much to Dante's Inferno). The text of Genesis was very much in vogue in the mid-1600s (much as it is today) and Paradise Lost attained an almost instant acclaim.
John Milton was an English cleric, a protestant who nonetheless had a great affinity for catholic Italy, and this duality of interests shows in much of his creative writing as well as his religious tracts. Milton was nicknamed 'the divorcer' in his early career for writing a pamphlet that supported various civil liberties, including the right to obtain a civil divorce on the grounds of incompatibility, a very unpopular view for the day. Milton held a diplomatic post under the Commonwealth, and wrote defenses of the governments action, including the right of people to depose and dispose of a bad king.
Paradise Lost has a certain oral-epic quality to it, and for good reason. Milton lost his eyesight in 1652, and thus had to dictate the poem to several different assistants. Though influenced heavily by the likes of Virgil, Homer, and Dante, he differentiated himself in style and substance by concentrating on more humanist elements.
Say first -- for Heaven hides nothing from thy view,
Nor the deep tract of Hell -- say first what cause
Moved our grand Parents, in that happy state,
Favoured of Heaven so highly, to fall off
From their Creator and transgress his will,
For one restraint, lords of the world besides?
Milton drops us from the beginning into the midst of the action, for the story is well known already, and proceeds during the course of the books (Milton's original had 10, but the traditional epic had 12 books, so some editions broke books VII and X into two books each) to both push the action forward and to give developing background -- how Satan came to be in Hell, after the war in heaven a description that includes perhaps the currently-most-famous line:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition though in hell:
Better to reign in hell, that serve in heav'n.
(Impress your friends by knowing that this comes from Book I, lines 261-263 of Paradise Lost, rather than a Star Trek episode!)
The imagery of warfare and ambition in the angels, God's wisdom and power and wrath, the very human characterisations of Adam and Eve, and the development beyond Eden make a very compelling story, done with such grace of language that makes this a true classic for the ages. The magnificence of creation, the darkness and empty despair of hell, the manipulativeness of evil and the corruptible innocence of humanity all come through as classic themes. The final books of the epic recount a history of humanity, now sinful, as Paradise has been lost, a history in tune with typical Renaissance renderings, which also, in Milton's religious convictions, will lead to the eventual destruction of this world and a new creation.
A great work that takes some effort to comprehend, but yields great rewards for those who stay the course.
This edition includes more than 50 pages of Milton's other poetry, including sonnets; there are also extensive sections of the KJV biblical text that directly relates to themes in Paradise Lost. Dozens of essays of literary criticism, from the likes of Voltaire, Dryden, Blake, Keats and Wordsworth as well as contemporary commentators such as Bloom, Frye and Adams complete this critical Norton edition.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: imake a point of reading this once a year.
Review: a riveting book for the philosophy of good and evil
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: The Best Work of Literature in the English Language
Review: Milton's "Paradise Lost" is the best work of literature in the English language, bar none. Christians and non-Christians alike should marvel at the vision presented by Milton. He is not a Satanist, as the Romantics would have you believe. Indeed, he is a devout Christian. This is what makes the work so extraordinary. Milton's vision of the astral world invokes various responses from the reader, all of them genuine and some contradictory. No matter who you are or what you believe, you will thoroughly enjoy this imaginary look into the events surrounding the fall of Lucifer and the beginnings of man in the Garden of Eden.