A crusty crankiness at modern life in Manhattan opens this collection: we live in "numbered caves in enormous jails," surrounded by the "lawless marches" of the Asphalt Lands; "mean cafes" entertain the lazy, while the stultified workers view "vulgar rubbish" and listen to "witless noise", making their "lewd fancies...of flesh debased."Nothing Auden does of his own and on his own is ever uninteresting: as the liveliest man-of-letters in the English-speaking world, he deserves front pages; his trifles are better than others' lifework."We can only do what it seems to us we were made for, look at the world with a happy eye but from a sober perspective."His enduring status as an outsider--the bachelor among the married, the Englishman among New Yorkers (or Austrians or Greeks), the ...