The Verbal Revolution How the Prague Spring broke world communism's main spring.

Slate ^ | Aug. 25, 2008 | Christopher Hitchens

[Lorianne]

Forty years ago this week, the greatest English-language poet of the 20th century sat down and wrote an eight-line verse:

The Ogre does what ogres can, Deeds quite impossible for Man, But one prize is beyond his reach, The Ogre cannot master Speech. About a subjugated plain, Among its desperate and slain, The Ogre stalks with hands on hips While drivel gushes from his lips.

W.H. Auden did not give this telling piece of brilliant doggerel a grandiose name. (He had, after all, called his finest poem "September 1, 1939," simply after the day on which it was composed.) But just as anyone with a sense of history will know what is intended by that date, so it is that those eight lines, titled "August 1968," evoke all the drama and tragedy of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia.

The Warsaw Pact no longer exists. Czechoslovakia no longer exists. The Soviet Union, which tried by force to keep the second entity as a part of the first one, likewise no longer exists. Yet few events in memory can be as real and "concrete"—to borrow a favorite term of Marxist propaganda—as the struggle that once took place in these far-from-ethereal regions of Central and Eastern Europe.

[LtKerst]

Now someone make one for Georga.

We need to be Shootin, that Ruskie Putin...

Hows that?

[Travis McGee]

Terrific poem!

[B2orNotB2]

That poem reminded me of a Czech poster of Lenin standing with a hemisphere of a globe at either side of his feet.

I didn't notice it at first, but then I realized it looked like two balls and an erect prick!

Perhaps, it was just a coincidence, but I suspect some clever Czech graphic artist managed to slip one over on his Communist overseers!