Prague autumn: Every day, in every way, Vaclav Havel, president of the Czech Republic, grows more afraid as his understanding of the gap between the poetry of freedom and the reality of politics improves:

'There is no more relying on the accidents of history that lift poets into places where empires and military alliances are brought down. The warning voices of poets must be carefully listened to and taken very seriously, perhaps even more seriously than the voices of bankers or stock brokers. But at the same time, we cannot expect that the world—in the hands of poets—will suddenly be transformed into a poem.' [NY Review of Books].

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