These three major works by the seventeenth-century English poet show why Milton takes his place beside Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, and Vergil. They ring with the unmistakable clarity of genius, with majesty of language, splendor and wealth of detail, and with the deep conviction of a powerful mind. Milton's masterpieces reflect the light of a many-faceted tradition; the intellectual freedom of Greek classicism, the moral passion of Hebrew prophets, the Protestant sense of an abiding religious belief.

Here is the ageless art, vital throughout the centuries, of the Puritan who undertook to "explain the ways of God to man."

The new annotations for this Mentor edition include the more interesting textual variations of the poems; and record, for the first time in any edition, the far-flung repetitions of phrases, and the scattered fixed epithets, within (and between) Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes.