Paradise Lost (Oxford Worlds
Classics) by John Milton
Excellent Edition
Paradise Lost is the great epic poem of the English language, a tale of
immense drama and excitement, of rebellion and treachery, of innocence
pitted against corruption, in which God and Satan fight a bitter battle for
control of mankinds destiny. The struggle ranges across heaven, hell, and
earth, as Satan and his band of rebel angels conspire against God. At the
center of the conflict are Adam and Eve, motivated by all too human
temptations, but whose ultimate downfall is unyielding love. This
marvelous new edition boasts an introduction by one of Miltons most
famous modern admirers, the best-selling novelist Philip Pullman. Indeed,
Pullman not only provides a general introduction, but also introduces each
of the twelve books of the poem. In these commentaries, Pullman
illuminates the power of the poem and its achievement as a story,
suggests how we should read it today, and describes its influence on him
and his acclaimed trilogy His Dark Materials, which takes its title from a
line in the poem. His observations offer a tribute that is both personal and

insightful, and his enthusiasm for Miltons language, skill, and supreme gifts
as a storyteller is infectious. He encourages readers above all to
experience the poem for themselves, and surrender to its enchantment.
Pullmans tremendous admiration and passion for Paradise Lost will attract
a whole new generation of readers to this classic of English literature. An
ideal gift, the book is beautifully produced, printed in two colors throughout,
illustrated with the twelve engravings from the first illustrated edition
published in 1688, with ribbon marker.
Personal Review: Paradise Lost (Oxford Worlds Classics) by
John Milton
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.

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