SLICK BUT NOT STREAMLINED

The Introduction makes this an Auden item for his fans. Actually, he identifies himself so emphatically with John Betjeman that it was with a certain sense of doubting the facts that I read that Betjeman was a real person,- a poet, a schoolmaster, a member of the staff of Architectural Review and the Evening Standard and, during the war, press attache of the British Legation in Dublin. Auden, in his Introduction, puts himself on the side of the author whose poems and short pieces he has brought together in this collection, as ""loving suburbs and gaslight and Gothic Revival Churches and provincial towns"" and says further that he ""sees no harm in trying to describe overbuilt Surrey in verse. But when I do ""says Auden"" I am not being satirical but topographical..."" So -- in his foreword to a volume of topographical verse and in so saying he describes its contents. Much of the writing suggests Auden, in its skill, its wit, its polish.