John Milton
Written by John Milton
Narrated by Samantha Bond and Derek Jacobi
4.5/5
()
About this audiobook
John Milton
John Milton was a seventeenth-century English poet, polemicist, and civil servant in the government of Oliver Cromwell. Among Milton’s best-known works are the classic epic Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, considered one of the greatest accomplishments in English blank verse, and Samson Agonistes. Writing during a period of tremendous religious and political change, Milton’s theology and politics were considered radical under King Charles I, found acceptance during the Commonwealth period, and were again out of fashion after the Restoration, when his literary reputation became a subject for debate due to his unrepentant republicanism. T.S. Eliot remarked that Milton’s poetry was the hardest to reflect upon without one’s own political and theological beliefs intruding.
More audiobooks from John Milton
Paradise Lost Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Essential John Milton Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Paradise Regained Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Related to John Milton
Related audiobooks
Popular Poetry, Popular Verse – Volume I Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Percy Bysshe Shelley Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5William Blake Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Classic American Poetry Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5John Keats Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Poetry Of William Wordsworth Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Poetry Of William Blake Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Great Poets: W.B. Yeats Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Great Poets: John Clare Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Great Narrative Poems of the Romantic Age Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Great Poets of the Romantic Age Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Great Poets: Matthew Arnold Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Poetry of Edmund Spenser Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5John Keats: Poems Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Faerie Queene Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Poetry for the Winter Season Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Classic Erotic Verse Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Great Poets: Wilfred Owen: The War Poetry of Wilfred Owen Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gerard Manley Hopkins Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Poetry Please: The National Best-Loved Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Poetry of Wales Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Poetry Of Trees Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Voices of Poetry, Volume 2 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Poems from one half of literatures most famous couple Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOliver Wendell Holmes Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Autumn: A Season In Verse: Also known as fall, enjoy the transition of summer to winter in beautiful poems. Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Sir Ralph Richardson reads Keats Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Summer: A Season in Verse Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSpring: A Season in Verse Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Poetry For You
The Inferno Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pretty Boys Are Poisonous: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Iliad: A New Translation by Caroline Alexander Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Spirits in Bondage Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beowulf: A New Translation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tao Te Ching: A New English Version Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Beowulf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Raven Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Milk and Honey Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beowulf: Translated by Seamus Heaney Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beowulf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Gift of Rumi: Experiencing the Wisdom of the Sufi Master Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This Other Eden Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Prophet Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Raven and Other Poems: Classic Tales Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: with Pearl and Sir Orfeo Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Temple Folk Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Gilgamesh: A New English Version Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey: The Fitzgerald Translation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Metamorphoses Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Classic Hundred Poems: All-Time Favorites Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Inferno of Dante Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Poems of T.S. Eliot Read by Jeremy Irons Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5W. B. Yeats: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Promises of Gold Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Strength In Our Scars Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Citizen: An American Lyric Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Related categories
Reviews for John Milton
39 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Loved the narration on the last chapter particularly! Jolly thrill listening
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I was not the best Milton student by any stretch of the imagination, but I survived total immersion fairly well. Oh, "Comus." Oh, Areopagitica. Really, Paradise Lost is what saves it all.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Recently, I read PL during my morning walks. Often aloud, it went surprisingly fast--about half a book per day, completed in a month. Of course, so many of the allusions, even with good footnotes and a lifetime of reading and a Ph.D. in 17C English lit, remain solidly beyond me, in a sempiternal world of classical and biblical allusion. But I read with the recognition that such allusions function as validating linkages, rather like real links online, or like Mercedes for the insecure.This may be my fifth time through it in entirety, and I have taught principally Book 9, Adam and Eve, maybe two dozen times. Everytime through I discover a few lines that surprise me. This time, just after my retirement, I found a line I've been quoting to my still-working colleagues: "To sit in hateful Office, here confined...." This is Sin at the gates of Hell, early on in the poem, in the first three books.I have in my memory perhaps 15 minutes of Paradise Lost, maybe my fave passage, "Men called him Mulciber, and how he fell From heav'n was fabled, thrown by angry JoveSheer o'er the crystal battlements. From mornTo noon he fell, from noon to dewy eveA summer's day, and with the setting sunDropped from the zenith like a falling starOn Lemnos and the Aegean isle: thus they report,Erring."(late in Bk 1)Here we have the grand sweep and forward motion of the verse, like a chase scene. And also, the added learned footnote and correction, so Puritanical, so Miltonic. Wish I had memorized much more, as I do with Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Shakespeare, and Dickinson (about an hour each). The organ voice of Milton's verse. The reserved parodic Andrew Marvell, my doctoral subject, Milton's assistant secretary of state, Latin Secretary--for all European countries and Russia then wrote in Latin.* The stone incisions of Yeats and Dickinson. (Marvell's verse critiques other poets, so my thesis, "This Critical Age," which ushered me into Larry Lipking's Princeton NEH post-doc, "The Poet Critics.")My new book, out at the end of 2016, takes off on Milton's title, Parodies Lost. It's the growth of a poet's mind via parodying Angelou, Dylan Thomas, Ashbery, Herrick, R Wilbur, even Dickinson. And the central figure is partly my great undergrad friend, the brilliant parodist (esp of prose), Tom Weiskel, known principally for his book The Romantic Sublime--though I only hear his unique voice in a half-dozen spots in it; I have heard him parody both criticism and poetry. We lost him at age 29, like Shelley. (Harold Bloom, Tom's mentor, invited my book to his home on Linden St, New Haven, saying, "I think of Tom every day. I still grieve him.")* Some of the funniest parts of Giordano Bruno's commedia "Candelaio" are in Latin, by and about the Latin teacher Manfurio, who admires himself, and his boy pupils who thwart him. For ex, Manny (in my trans.) refuses to use the word "Robber," insists on "Surreptor" so no-one knows he's been robbed. For the scene acted at London's Bridewell theater, see Youtube: "Candelaio Final Edit."
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The texts in this book form a central part of my dissertation so my copy is very well-thumbed! It's great for students like myself as there's room for annotations etc. and has informative footnotes and a critical introduction summing up his life. It gives a fairly comprehensive overview of Milton's work: his most famous prose works, early poems, Samson Agonistes, Paradise Lost & Regained are all present, as well as a few selections from lesser-known works such as Christian Doctrine (which would have made for a larger and duller tome if included so I'm glad I had to look elsewhere for that!) The cover illustration as you can see is very appropriate to the feel of Paradise Lost and it looks nice on a bookshelf, as Oxford Classics do. A good all-round introduction to his work.