Sublime Reciprocity in Milton, Kant and WordsworthLight Out of Darkness

Reveals how Milton’s poetry deploys the reciprocal forces of ‘first matter’ in order to access the experience of co-existent being

• Demonstrates how Milton, Kant, and Wordsworth together offer a revolutionary understanding of the function of poetry in the quest of human consciousness for participation in being
• Shows how in Paradise Lost Milton locates and sustains the event of serial reciprocity within a limitless network of divine and human reciprocities that for the reader issue in the experience of the sublime
• Argues that Milton’s and Wordsworth’s poetry of the reciprocal adds up to something entirely different from the "anxiety of influence" that Harold Bloom read into an allegedly Miltonic ego that fights to overcome its competitor precursors

In Paradise Lost the reciprocal forces of ‘first matter’ are centrally located in ‘Light Ethereal, first of things’, ‘that light’, as Raphael explains, that is constituted from its inhering ‘reciprocal’ forces. This study argues that the workings of this Miltonic reciprocity were first understood in concrete specificity by Immanuel Kant, though buried on two intricately argued manuscript pages of his Opus postumum. Almost as remarkable as Kant’s Miltonic recognitions, William Wordsworth – directly inspired by earlier Kantian ideas of reciprocity and of the sublime – made his own way to this Miltonic poetics of co-existent being, most spectacularly in The Prelude. In this fascinating study, Budick demonstrates how Milton, Kant and Wordsworth together offer a revolutionary understanding of the function of poetry in the quest of human consciousness for participation in being.