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| Paradise Lost (Great Epics) | 
| Author: John Milton
Creators: Anton Lesser, Laura Paton, Chris Larkin
Publisher: Naxos Audiobooks
Category: Book
List Price: $17.98
Buy New: $11.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  19 reviews
Sales Rank: 1368113
Format: Audiobook
Media: Audio Cassette
Edition: Cas/Bklt
Number Of Items: 3
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 5.5 x 4.3 x 1.4
ISBN: 9626345020
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9789626345023
ASIN: 9626345020
Publication Date: September 1994
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New in shrinkwrap. Fountain Street Books ships out Same day or Next day. All orders shipped in protective bubble mailers.
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Rise and fall! October 31, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
Enthralling April 5, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Unbelievably inspiring. I challenge you to compare his reading with any one else's or your own in your head. He makes it alive. Not perfect, mind you. You'll find yourself suggesting to him in certain spots that he missed the meaning by putting some emphasis or other on the wrong words. Nevertheless, you know you couldn't do better overall. A real treasure.
Review of the Buccaneer Books Library Binding edition March 5, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
My review is of the library binding edition released by Buccaneer Books. It is a very plain and small volume which is wonderfully bound. It contains nothing but the poem itself (including the prose arguments) with the original spelling and punctuation. That means no notes, commentary, or introduction, so if you're looking for lots of in-text help, this isn't what you want. The Fowler, Hughes, or Norton editions are all laden with helpful material like that. But if you just want to experience Milton's masterpiece alone, this is a lovely edition. I found that the book could be purchased much more cheaply if I ordered directly from the publisher's website.
 Perfectly good recording, incomplete text December 21, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Great for a long drive or while driving cross town in Manhattan. You can debate the issues of suffering with Milton in your head.
Sure do wish it were the whole work.
Zenith October 20, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Milton in Paradise Lost unfurls a morning star banner heralding the cosmic story of the fall of angels and men in language eminently civil. I am sure that Homer and Dante were Milton's schoolmasters yet Milton almost exceeds them in the slendid language and poetry of this epic creation. Philip Pullman said "No one, not even Shakespeare, surpasses Milton in his command of the sound, the music, the weight and taste and texture of English words". This is a poem of majesty and sublime lyricism as in Milton's description of Mulciber falling:
"from Morn
To Noon he fell, from Noon to dewy Eve,
A Summer's day; and with the setting Sun
Dropt from the Zenith like a falling Star".
Each book of Paradise Lost is introduced with an argument, or summary. These arguments were written by Milton and added because early readers had requested a guide to the poem. Milton's purpose in this masterpiece is to tell about the fall of man and justify God's ways to man. When the angels battle in heaven at one point they pull up mountains and hills and throw them at each other: "So Hills amid the Air encounterd Hills Hurl'd to and fro with jaculation dire, That under ground, they fought in dismal shade." After their coup attempt in heaven Satan and the other rebel angels are lying stunned on a lake of fire. Satan rises from the lake and makes his way to the shore. He calls the other angels to do the same, and they assemble by and above the lake. Satan tells them that all is not lost and tries to cheer his followers. Led by Mammon and Mulciber, the fallen angels build their capital and palace Pandemonium. They decide to get at God through his new creation and Satan sets off on this mission. In reading Paradise Lost the poem reads the reader while being read. What I mean is that Milton lets his readers go awry in their affections and he corrects and instructs those misreadings as well as anticipates them. In this way the poem becomes a live text with meaning apprehended through the interplay between the peruser of the poem and the text itself. Milton allows the reader to subjectively question the justice of the current religious paradigm and then leads them back to the perspicacity of deity. Ultimately Paradise Lost is Milton's paean to a vast pattern in the universe, the disruption of that pattern by rebels, and the weaving of those rebellion threads back into an ever more beautiful tapestry.
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