Václav Havel claimed to want a quiet life dedicated to writing, but he lived exactly the opposite: as the most famous dissident in Czechoslovakia under Communist rule, he spent many years in jail as a political prisoner and, after leading a revolutionary movement in 1989, thirteen years as president and twenty as one of the most respected intellectuals on the world stage. Throughout this eventful story ran themes that Havel himself established as a young man composing poetry in the 1950s. This biography is the first to pay close attention to Havel’s poetry and to place his later work as a writer of plays, essays, prison letters and presidential speeches in the context of his poetic beginnings, his formative stylistic and philosophical influences, and his lifelong rivalry with slightly older poets who turned, as he did, to other genres.