John Milton - The Annotated Milton: Complete English Poems

CONTENTS

CHRONOLOGY

PREFACE

T HE FIRST version of what would become this book was written into the pages of another editors deservedly famous edition of Milton. Principally lexical and syntactic commentary, these early annotations stemmed directly from an extremely common quandary, namely, a teacher fundamentally (though by no means completely) dissatisfied with the textbook from which, for lack of anything better suited to his classroom, he goes on teaching. That sort of dissatisfaction can be lived with; it can finally be put to the side; or it can lead, as mine has, to a completely new book.

I teach Milton as an English poet, one of the very greatest, most influential, important, and deeply challenging the language has ever known. Although I firmly believe, like most scholars, that the more we know about any writer the more we can understand and also appreciate the resonating excellences and profundities of his or her work, I also believe that some of the things we can know are more useful than are others. Miltons English poetry seems to me so overwhelmingly primary to both appreciation and understanding of his place in English literature that his Latin poetry shrinks to tertiary significance, and his profusely vigorous prose to secondary significance. Accordingly, this edition of Milton contains none of the Latin (or the Italian) poems, either in the original language(s) or in translation. It contains none of Miltons prose.

The text of the English poems, however, is not only complete, but has been conservatively modernized and edited for maximum accessibility. Nothing has been done to interfere in any way whatever with the prosody of these poems. The vexing problem of syllabified versus unsyllabified vowels has been preempted by (1) the use of spelling to indicate each prosodically suppressed vowel (usually by means of an apostrophe, sometimes by such spellings as shouldst or didst), and (2) the addition of an accent mark each time a vowel is syllabified (wingd, blessd). My prosodic markings are consistent throughout this book. When, therefore, a word such as winged is mono-rather than bisyllabic, I have added neither an apostrophe nor an accent mark; the reader can assume that any word without one of those marks does not in my judgment require one.

Rather too much has been made of Miltons spelling, much of which is conventional and, though appropriate to his time, without significance in ours. His punctuation is in general (though not universally) a reliable guide to verse movement. I have punctuated, and capitalized, as conservatively as possible. But I have not hesitated to interpret Miltons use of semicolons and colons as requiring, in our time, a sentence-ending period. Nor have I hesitated to add reader-friendly paragraphing.

I would have been happier had my annotations been able to be placed alongside the line they refer to. The economics of publishing makes this impossible. But since I do not believe that lexical annotations consisting only of a single word are truly satisfactory, I have often given three or four or even more words in each gloss. Placing all annotations at the bottom of the page does, therefore, have at least the advantage of clearly separating annotations one from the other.

Most of my lexical annotations are to words rather than to phrases, clauses, or sentences. As a teacher, I have found that students need to know what the components mean, just as much as they need to know the meaning of the finished product. Indeed, understanding syntax becomes a good deal easier when the components are clearly understoodand many of my annotations are syntactic as well as lexical. All syntactic material is placed in square brackets: [verb]. If, as is usually the case, annotations are both lexical and syntactic, the lexical portion always precedes the syntactic.