SUSANNAH YOUNG-AH GOTTLIEB

                        "REFLECTION ON THE RIGHT TO WILL":   AUDEN'S "CANZONE" 
                        AUDEN'S "CANZONE" AND ARENDT'S NOTES ON WILLING

This article reads in detail one of Auden’s most difficult, formally complex, and generally neglected poems, "Canzone," and interprets this poem’s central concern — the nature of the will — in light of Arendt’s late reflections on the faculty of willing. "Canzone" is modeled after a form invented and used only once by Dante for his poem "Amor, tu vedi ben che questa Donna," in which only five rhyme words are used to end more than sixty lines of poetry. Whereas, for Dante, the novelty of the form serves as compensation for the non-reciprocation of his love, for Auden the repetitions in the form serve to chastise the will, which seeks to master both the poet’s own emotions and the affections of another. Repetition precludes willing, because willing demands an open future — one determined not by a past that returns in ever-repeating cycles, but by the will itself. But the closed, repetitive form of Auden’s "Canzone" locks the (word) will into a pattern of return. Thus frustrated, the will finds itself "caught in reflection on the right to will."

A precise measure of the intellectual affinity between Auden and Arendt can be found in the fact that Arendt, too, is drawn into a reflection on the right — more exactly, the legitimacy — of the faculty of willing from the perspective of its competing faculties, above all, thinking. And Arendt’s reflections revolve around the same temporal conundrums that give Auden’s poem its definitive shape: the faculty of willing is discovered when the classical idea of eternal return is no longer taken for granted, and it becomes a central category of philosophical reflection when the idea of cyclical temporality gives way to eschatological hopes. Scholastic philosophy, which Arendt places at the center of her investigation, conceives of its duty as the reconciliation of will with intellect, hence, the reconciliation of the cosmic, cyclical time of Platonic-Aristotelian thought — which honors necessity — with the demands of a temporality marked by an absolute beginning in divine creation and an equally absolute endpoint: the eschatological vision of the future. And Dante, for Auden as well as Arendt, serves as a figure in whom these two conceptions of temporality achieve a tenuous — but ultimately impossible — reconciliation.