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].
