Volume 10 143
from that society. Part of their goal was to disrupt
poetic conventions and therefore readers’ expecta-
tions in order to challenge the standards of bour-
geois culture. Auden, along with Eliot, Pound,
Yeats, and Hopkins helped create this new form.
The Auden Generation
English society in the 1930s became increas-
ingly concerned with the political and economic re-
alities of that decade, especially the rise of Fascism
and the threat of another world war. Much of the
poetry of this period reflected the culture’s pes-
simism and turned back to the more realistic struc-
tures common in the first decade of the twentieth
century. Themes often revolved around class divi-
sion and sexual repression. The poets of what has
come to be known as “The Auden Generation” (Au-
den along with C. Day-Lewis, Louis MacNeice,
and Stephen Spender) or “The Oxford Group” ad-
dressed these themes with defiance. Each poet en-
visioned a new world order based on Marxist pre-
cepts. Their poetry is characterized by its variety—
its use of different genres (like Auden’s adoption
of the blues ballad form) and quick shifts of tone,
intermingling the colloquial and the obscure, the
serious and the playful.
Critical Overview
The revised version of “Funeral Blues” appeared
in Auden’s collection of poetry, Another Time,pub-
lished in 1940. Initial reviews of the volume were
mixed. Richard Eberhart in the Boston Transcript
stated, “These poems maintain Auden’s reputation
at its high level. There is scarcely a bad line in the
book.” Alfred Kreymborg in Living Agefound that
the poems reveal “a new note of tenderness, a ma-
ture appraisal of love in an otherwise crumbling
world.” Other critics, however, felt the poems con-
firmed their opinion that Auden, in T. C. Worsely’s
words in the New Statesman and Nation,“is and
always will be an uneven poet.” P. M. Jack writ-
ing for The New York Timesinsists that Another
Time“might be called ‘marking time,’ in which
many of the faults and few of the virtues of the au-
thor are seen. In particular there is a startling re-
striction of the imagination.... The imagery is hum-
drum.”
A few comments specifically on “Funeral
Blues” appeared later in scholarly books and arti-
cles. Monroe K. Spears in his Poetry of W. H. Au-
denpraised the style of the poem, claiming that its
“blues rhythm and syncopation are expertly sug-
gested.” George T. Wright in his book on Auden
commends the poem’s “elegant polished expres-
sion of longing.” Public response to the poem was
overwhelmingly positive after John Hannah recited
an excerpt in the hit filmFour Weddings and a Fu-
neral.Since the publication of Another Time,schol-
ars’ assessment of Auden’s career has been quite
strong. Sean O’Brien in London’s Sunday Times
notes “Auden is one of the few modern poets whose
reputation has not dimmed in the years following
his death.... There is a widening stream of critical
and biographical writing, as well as Edward
Mendelson’s enormous labours on the gradually
emerging Complete Works.” Most scholars would
agree with the appraisal of Auden’s body of work
made by the National Book Committee, which
awarded him the National Medal for Literature in
1967: “[Auden’s poetry] has illuminated our lives
and times with grace, wit and vitality. His work,
branded by the moral and ideological fires of our
age, breathes with eloquence, perception and intel-
lectual power.”Criticism
Wendy Perkins
Wendy Perkins, an Associate Professor of Eng-
lish at Prince George’s Community College in
Maryland, has published articles on several twen-
tieth-century authors. In this essay she examines
the revisions made in the final version of “Funeral
Blues” and how those revisions reflected changes
in tone and theme.The first version of W. H. Auden’s “Funeral
Blues” appeared in his playThe Ascent of F6in
1936 and was referred to by its first line, “Stop all
the clocks, cut off the telephone.” In 1940 Auden
included a revised version of the poem in his col-
lection of poetry, Another Time. The revision,
which he titled “Funeral Blues,” retained the orig-
inal poem’s first two stanzas and replaced the last
three with two new stanzas. George T. Wright, in
his book on the poet, noted that Auden “was a con-
tinual reviser, rearranger, and even discarder of his
early poems.” This revision, however, was one of
his more drastic ones. When Auden turned “Stop
all the clocks” into “Funeral Blues,” he transformed
a confused mixture of burlesque and sorrow into a
stirring lament over the death of a loved one, cre-
ating what Sean O’Brien in London’s Sunday
Timescalled his most “accessible” poem.Funeral Blues