The Student’s Milton

The Student’s Milton is basically a big one-volume Milton command center: poetry, prose, notes, and translations gathered for students rather than casual bedtime reading. The 1930 edition is titled The Student’s Milton: Being the Complete Poems of John Milton, with the Greater Part of His Prose Works, edited by Frank Allen Patterson and published by F. S. Crofts & Co.

It contains, broadly:

1. Milton’s complete poems
This includes the major thunder-cathedral works:

• Paradise Lost
• Paradise Regained
• Samson Agonistes

And the shorter poems, such as:

• “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”
• “L’Allegro”
• “Il Penseroso”
• “Comus”
• “Lycidas”
• the sonnets
• other early and occasional poems

2. Translations of Milton’s non-English poems
The title page says it includes “new translations into English of his Italian, Latin, and Greek poems,” so the book lets English readers access Milton’s classical and continental poetic work without needing to juggle Latin like a flaming scholarly chainsaw.

3. A large selection of Milton’s prose
Not every single prose work, but “the greater part” of them. These typically include major political, religious, educational, and free-speech writings such as:

• Areopagitica, his famous argument against censorship
• Of Education
• divorce writings such as The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce
• anti-bishop / church reform pamphlets
• political works such as The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates
• later religious prose, including material connected to Christian Doctrine
• writings on toleration, heresy, church power, and conscience

4. Student apparatus
Depending on the edition, it also includes editorial introductions, notes, explanatory material, and reference tools. The point was to make Milton usable for college study. One Milton reference describes Patterson’s edition as an “enormous one-volume edition” with complete poetry and a generous selection of annotated prose that became a standard teaching edition in the U.S. during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.

So, in plain English: The Student’s Milton is not just Paradise Lost. It is Milton the poet, Milton the rebel pamphleteer, Milton the theologian, Milton the free-speech absolutist, Milton the cosmic architect, all stuffed into one brick of a book.