W. H. Auden’s “August 1968” has been on my mind recently. The idea that a poet might compose an immediate response to a catastrophe (in this case, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the brutal suppression of the Prague Spring) is, to me, a hopeful one. Auden wrote the poem quickly and then telephoned, on a Friday evening, an editorial assistant at The Observer; it appeared in the newspaper on Sunday morning. The poem didn’t change the course of the invasion (poetry makes nothing happen, etc.), but it did register a kind of moral dissent that still feels palpable, almost fifty years later. “The Ogre does what ogres can, / Deeds quite impossible for Man, / But one prize is beyond his reach, / The Ogre cannot master Speech.”
We depend on poets for this kind of expression, of course. A totalitarian regime communicates through jargon and claptrap; a poet (or a poet like Auden, anyway) fires back with rhyme and tetrameter. At the time, the fight doesn’t feel fair—but history has a way of declaring surprising victors. Jump forward to 1989: the occupation ends. As Christopher Hitchens remembers it, “Not a shot was fired, and not a skull was broken, but the system farcically evaporated in the face of a wave of literate and humorous and ironic and defiant words, uttered by novelists like Milan Kundera, playwrights like Vaclav Havel, and singers like the Plastic People of the Universe. Velvet has always struck me as a vapid word for this cultural revolution. If we must have a V, then verbal would be preferable.”
But I’ve only given you half of the poem so far. Here’s how it ends:
About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.
Remind you of anyone? Someone whose speech checks in at a fourth-grade level, despite his claim of having “the best words”? Someone who has run a misogynistic, racist, ridiculous campaign, and whose supporters are implicated, like it or not, in that putrid moral stew? (The stench also clings to those who don’t stand against him. Third-party voters, take note.) Someone who has forced The New York Times to drop gentler words like “errors” and “falsehoods” and to call the drivel that gushes from his lips what it plainly is: lies?
Back to Hitchens. In his essay concerning the Prague Spring and Auden’s response to it, he writes:
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.
I admire politically charged poetry, and I admire truth (or truths, really) spoken to power. But here’s my real hope: That we don’t need anything of that sort, this time around. That the date “November 2016” means almost nothing to future generations. That it evokes no drama, no tragedy. Because that’ll mean a Trump presidency, a Trump subjugation, never happened.