The Complete Works of John Milton ─ The Shorter Poems

Volume III of the new eleven-volume edition of Milton's Complete Works from the Oxford University Press provides a definitive scholarly edition of all of Milton's shorter poems in English, Italian, Latin, and Greek, as well as his Mask, taken from both published and manuscript sources. It presents his 1645 Poems complete, with all prefatory materials, to display the ways in which author, publisher, and printshop shaped this volume. It then presents all the new poems added in the 1673 edition (with the new Table of Contents), and the poems omitted from both editions. A careful collation of textual variants among these sources as well as the 1637 anonymous publication of Milton's Mask is provided. Also, the Bridgewater manuscript version of Milton's Mask (close to the acting version), and his working copy from the Trinity Manuscript, with its many alterations and additions, are transcribed in their entirety, so that the various versions may be compared and studied.

A special feature of this edition is the new translation of Milton's many Latin and Greek poems that is both accurate and attentive to their literary quailities. Also, it supplies a poetic translation of Milton's six italian sonnets and Canzone. In addition, it presents in Appendices, of all the versions of Milton's shorter poems in all the contemporary manuscript and printed sources, so they may be compared and examined in relation to their specific contexts. The transcription of all the versions of Milton's poems in the Trinity Manuscript allows in several cases, notably 'Lycidas' and 'At a Solemn Music', for examination of the evolution of these poems as Milton weighed choices of diction and sound qualities and so enables further understanding of his poetic practices.

Introductory essays address the occasions and circumstances for all these poems, the poetic development of the Vernacular poems as Milton worked in several genres, and for his Latin and Greek Poemata it provides an overview of Milton's achievement as a Neo-Latin poet, as well as a detailed account of the criticism pertaining to each poem. A Textual Introduction discusses all of the sources, printed and manuscript, in which Milton's poems appear, points up special features of many copies of both collected editions as well as the volume in which Milton's 'Lycidas' was first published (Justa Edouardo King naufrago), and indicates the marginalia and other notes supplied by several contemporary readers. As an aid to both students and scholars, the Commentary sections provide word definitions from the OED, highlighting occasions when Milton's usage was the earliest one recorded, and also identify biblical, classical, historical, and geographical allusions and references, and some relevant critical studies of particular elements.

Barbara Kiefer Lewalski is William R. Kenan Jr. Research Professor of History and Literature and of English at Harvard University. She held professorial chairs and taught at Harvard and at Brown University for many years, and served as Director of Graduare Studies in English at both institutions. Her several books and articles are chiefly in the area of Renaissance English literature, especially Milton. Her Life of John Milton: a Critical Biography (2000) won the James Holly Hanford prize of the Milton Society of America; her Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (l979) was awarded the James Russell Lowell Prize for best book, by the Modern Landuage Association. She has held visiting appointments at several universities, including in China (the Beijing Foreign Studies University) and has lectured widely in America, England, and elsewhere.

Estelle Haan is Professor of English and Neo-Latin Studies at The Queen's University of Belfast. She is the author/editor of twelve books spanning her research interests in neo-Latin literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These include From Academia to Amicitia: Milton's Latin Writings and the Italian Academies (1998), Thomas Gray's Latin Poetry: Some Classical, Neo-Latin and Vernacular Contexts (2000), Andrew Marvell's Latin Poetry: From Text to Context (2003), Classical Romantic: Identity in the Latin Poetry of Vincent Bourne (2007), Both English and Latin: Bilingualism and Biculturalism in Milton's Neo-Latin Writings (2012). In addition to authoring a stream of articles on Milton, she contributed two essays to The Oxford Handbook of Milton (2009). She is currently editing Milton's Epistolarum Familiarium Liber Unus , and uncollected letters for The Oxford Complete Works of John Milton , Volume 11.