"Reflection on the right to will": Auden's "Canzone" and Arendt's notes on willing

Does God ever judge us by appearances? I suspect that he does. (Auden, Poems 856)

WITH THIS EPIGRAPH from W.H. Auden, Hannah Arendt begins her last work, The Life of the Mind. Although it appears to be merely a witty apothegm-and its inclusion among the peculiar genre Auden called "Shorts" might lend credence to this evaluation-Auden's words go to the heart of a modernist predicament: the revaluation of appearances, which began in earnest with Nietzsche, cannot be undertaken without a gesture toward something that transcends appearances, nor can it be pursued without a perspective that immerses itself in appearances in order to break their spell-the perspective of "suspicion." In her choice of epigraph and in her treatment of Auden's poetry throughout The Life of the Mind, Arendt indicates a strong affinity with the work of her friend; similarly, Auden, in various prose writings, especially his review of Arendt's The Human Condition, emphasizes that the two participate in a common project.1 The stakes of this project are most readily comprehensible in terms of the dangers that arise not so much from the modernist dilemma to which Auden's apothegm alludes as from two broadly defined attempts to escape this dilemma, both of which result in the occlusion of any space for the faculty of willing. On the one hand, gestures toward transcendence are converted into a steadfast conviction that salvation lies in a transcendent being or in a nostalgic return to those forms of life in which such beings were still believable; on the other hand, suspicion is raised to such a high level that it leaves no place for stable forms and gives way to a mode of isolation that can no longer even be considered a "perspective" since it does not open onto anything like a common world. If the first danger leads to dubious calls for renewal-what Auden denounces as "a new Constantinism"2__ the second tends to make every appearance into a novum, the ironic result of which is a doctrine of eternal recurrence. Arendt's and Auden's acute awareness of these sharply contrasting but nevertheless kindred dangers generates a particular sensitivity toward the intricate dialectic of novelty and repetition, and this sensitivity not only gives rise to certain themes that dominate both of their works-- one need only think of Auden's fascination with the figure of Don Juan3-but also expresses itself in the formal experimentation that characterizes so much of their writing. Arendt invents a novel form of exposition for each of her major works, and Auden explores an astonishing variety of poetic forms, some of which come close to exhausting the resources of an uninflected language like English.4 Even the Auden poem Arendt chooses as the epigraph for her last work is evidence of this, for it is an experiment in pure syllabic form derived from the Japanese haiku-which was originally a "humorous" (haikai) "opening part" (hokku) of a jointly authored composition.

Of Auden's many experiments in poetic form, none leads so quickly into the dialectic of novelty and repetition as does his largely overlooked, enormously difficult, and emphatically peculiar 1942 poem, "Canzone" (Auden, Poems 33031).5 The poem is peculiar at the very least because its form is unusual-almost unique-in the Western literary tradition and, at the time of its composition, unprecedented in the English language. Of course English poets have written canzoni, many on the model of Petrarch, but among the many poetic forms called canzoni, Auden chooses a particularly difficult one, invented and employed only once by Dante in his poem of 1296 or '97, "Amor, tu vedi ben the questa Donna."6 This poem is one of the time petrose, in which Dante celebrates his frustrated love for an unnamed lady. In this exacting poetic form there are five twelve-line stanzas, with a commiato of six lines, in which each line ends with one of only five rhyme words-donna, petra, freddo, luce, and tempo (lady, stone, cold, light, and time). The rhyme words appear in an ordered sequence whose repetition and cyclical transition from one dominant word to another corresponds to the transmutation of one element into another and to the transfiguration of something in the natural world into something divine. The poem is itself born of these transformations, as Dante indicates in the final stanza, when the coldness of the lady becomes, for the poet, the cause and condition for the invention of "the non fu mai pensata in alcun tempo [something never thought before in any time]," namely, this novel poetic form.7

Dante's final apostrophe to the poem-"Canzone, io porto ne la mente donna [song, I carry in my mind a lady] "-is meant to indicate that the poet's sexual frustration can be transformed into the novelty of a hitherto unheard-of song: the poet wants the fulfillment of the will that gives rise to the poem-the will to be loved by the lady. And he implores God to bring about this, the last transmutation of a cold substance into something warm, the final satisfaction of the poet's will. In the meantime, he celebrates the novelty of the thing he can master: the poem, song or "canzone." Although he praises novelty, what he really wants remains the same; indeed, he wants nothing less than the return of the same, the reciprocal return of his warm, loving glance. Novelty here functions as compensation; it is a substitute for the eschatological or even messianic moment in which all things finally return, in Stoic-Christian terms apokatastasis canton. Once the lady undergoes an ordered transformation, warms up, and returns his love-and this "once" occurs at, and as, the end of time-all things will have returned. Cosmic time does not run counter to eschatological time; on the contrary, the latter confirms the former, and the novelty of the song, like the stubborn uniqueness of the untransformed, still cold lady, is merely an index of the expectation of return. The satisfaction of the will depends upon the possibility that it can produce the conditions of its own fulfillment, that the will can project itself into -and thereby master-a future, bringing that which escapes the will into the ordered course of events. As Auden's "Canzone" repeats Dante's poem, it analyzes the zone of this possibility, this can-zone.