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Literary Modernism

The first version of “Funeral Blues” appeared in 1936, a little more than a decade after the epochal shift in literature that has come to be known as Modernism. This shift occurred in the aftermath of World War I. The unprecedented brutality and scope of this war shook many people’s faith in the various social, political, and religious institutions that had previously seemed to hold the world together. Many writers working after the war felt that Western civilization had been reduced to ruins. For key figures working at the height of this movement, one of the most urgent questions pertained to the matter of aesthetic form. That is, they asked themselves what new forms needed to be invented to represent how the world had changed since the war. Naturally, there were many different responses to this question. Although different in their approaches, writers often emphasized experimentation with fragmentation. Although “Funeral Blues” isn’t as experimental as some of the landmarks of literary Modernism, like T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Auden does experiment with form in ways that underscore the theme of instability. The speaker’s agonistic relationship to the world at large also recalls literary Modernism’s general sense of the world’s breakdown.

Cabaret

A perhaps unexpected context worth considering for readers of “Funeral Blues” is the form of entertainment known as cabaret. A cabaret is essentially a variety show, one that can feature songs, dances, poetic recitations, and dramatic performances. The connection to cabaret comes from the original appearance of “Funeral Blues” as a song in the 1936 play The Ascent of F6, cowritten with Christopher Isherwood. In the context of the play, the poem was sung to blues-style music written by the English composer Benjamin Britten. Soon after the play’s premiere, Auden revised the poem with the specific aim of making it work as a song for the cabaret singer Hedli Anderson. It was at that point that Auden called the song “Funeral Blues.” A further revision of this text appeared under that same title in Auden’s 1940 poetry collection, Another Time, in a section called “Four Cabaret Songs for Miss Hedli Anderson.” In 1945, when his Collected Poetry was published, Auden stripped the poem of its title and made it the ninth in a series of “Twelve Songs.” Today, critics still refer to the poem by its original name, which serves as a reminder of its link to the cabaret.

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