Sublime Reciprocity in Milton, Kant and Wordsworth: Light Out of Darkness

by Sanford Budick

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399541138
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	01/31/2025
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Sanford Budick is Emeritus Professor of English at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was formerly Professor of English at Cornell University. He has published six monographs, two of which won the Hanford Award of the Milton Society and has edited three collections of essays on key issues in literary studies.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements
Note on Citations

Conspectus: Reciprocal Expression in Milton, Kant and Wordsworth
1. Paradise Lost and the "Reciprocal"
2. Kant and Milton’s Reciprocal Expression
3. "Light out of darkness" in Paradise Lost: "Answering" God’s "great Idea"
4. Wordsworth’s Kantian Ideas: The View from "Yew-Trees"
5. Wordsworth with Milton and Kant in "The Ruined Cottage" and the Immortality Ode
6. The Miltonic-Kantian Prelude: "A power like one of Nature’s"

Appendix: Harold Bloom on the Trope of ‘Transumption’ in Paradise Lost
Index

Editorial Reviews

With an intellectual strenuousness of thought equal to his ambitious topic, Budick in this magisterial work reads Milton and Wordsworth not as mere versifiers of ideas developed by philosophers but as themselves productive of philosophical insight, even as he demonstrates the constructive value of the aesthetic in Kant’s philosophical reasoning.

Steve Fallon