Muse of Fire: World War I As Seen Through the Lives of the Soldier Poets by Michael Korda. Liveright Publishing, 2024, 381 pp.
The number of books on the First World War is expansive and often focuses on themes such as the causes of conflict, the disaster of trench warfare, or the war’s ending as it relates to the Second World War. It can be hard to find a monograph on the Great War—as the First World War was known until 1939—that brings a new perspective to the historiography. Michael Korda, former Simon & Schuster editor-in-chief and biographer of notable figures including Dwight D. Eisenhower and T. E. Lawrence, takes on the topic of World War I from the vantage point of soldier poets—poets who actively engaged in combat during the war. Muse of Fire underscores how a seemingly simple form of art such as poetry can transform how historians and scholars reflect on soldiers’ experiences on the battlefield.
Korda’s central argument focuses on war poetry’s transformation between 1914 and 1918 as soldiers grew increasingly discontent with the war. This is effectively showcased by Korda’s intentional organization of his monograph. Muse of Fire begins with early poets whose work reflected the jubilation and blind patriotism often attributed to the first years of World War I. Starting with perhaps one of the more well-known soldier poets, Korda notes that Rupert Brooke’s work “came to symbolize the spirit in which Britain entered the Great War: optimistic, willing and even eager to sacrifice, patriotic” (8). Written in 1914, Brooke’s poem “The Soldier” states, “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England” (113). Brooke’s readiness to give his life for his country is a theme that extends to other early soldier poets. Korda notes that Alan Seeger, an American poet who volunteered to serve under the French Foreign Legion, was “as romantic about war and as eager for death as Rupert Brooke” (126).
Yet this enthusiasm all but disappears in the poetry from the latter stages of the war. Poets such as the UK’s Siegfried Sassoon, who outlived the war, went on to write poetry that rejected earlier feelings of patriotism, instead highlighting the cynical perception that “the lives of soldiers were being wasted by military incompetence” (268). Korda’s arrangement of the poems somewhat chronologically offers insight into the ideological shift in attitude toward the war from euphoria to anger and hostility.
Poetry as the central medium to understand this evolution of attitudes is a bold and perhaps not obvious choice. Addressing why he chose poetry, specifically from soldiers, Korda explains in his introduction that news about the war was “tightly censored” except for its poetry, which he finds remarkable as “poetry could reach a much larger readership than had hitherto been thought possible, and that a poet might become a national hero” (xv).
Throughout the war, other mediums in which civilians back home received news about the front were strenuously censored. Photographers arranged soldiers into positions that would represent traditional heroism. Government officials censored news reports to project confidence in the country’s ability to win the war. Poetry was not considered a serious form of expression, and poems from soldiers sent to family members and those back home who helped to publish the poems often slipped through the cracks of censorship and snuck into newspapers, books, and in one case a speech on the floor of the House of Commons. Therefore, poems came directly from the battlefields into the homes of civilians to portray a more accurate picture of what the war was really like.
While Korda’s discussion of poetry is insightful, his inclusion of specific poems from soldiers is profound. Classic examples of literature on the front line during World War I are often cited from texts such as Storms of Steel (1920) and All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), to name two. Yet these examples are typically written from a post-war perspective, from the vantage point of the soldiers who lived to see the war’s end. The use of poems written by soldiers between 1914 and 1918 provides numerous snapshots that provide an almost real-time understanding of the mindset of soldiers during the war.
For example, after a tough night in the trenches, Britain’s Issac Rosenberg, wrote, “Grotesque and quietly huddled / Contortionists to twist / The sleep soul to sleep, / We lie all sorts of ways / And cannot sleep” (203). While this poem covers a topic that might be considered mundane to most, it offers a glimpse as to how important finding sleep in any form possible was to the soldiers dealing with fatigue and sheer exhaustion. Sassoon wrote toward the end of the war, “I see [soldiers] in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats, / … Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats, / And mocked by hopeless longing to regain” (315). This demonstrates how despite the horrors of war, images of home fueled soldiers in battle. Yet they also ironically served as a reminder that many would never return. These insights into the minds of soldiers while in the midst of battle would not be possible without the snapshots that the poems provided.
There are moments throughout Muse of Fire where the descriptions of poets’ lives overlap and in turn come across as repetitive. In several instances, especially when addressing the personal lives of the soldier poets, the same information is brought up numerous times. A prominent example of this is the discussion of Edward Marsh, who was not a poet but rather the longest-serving private secretary for Winston Churchill. Marsh was a pivotal figure in the lives of many of the poets, playing a significant role in promoting the poems to a larger audience. In nearly every chapter, Marsh’s presence is felt. In the case of Rosenberg, Marsh acted as his editor. Marsh and Brooke had a personal relationship with one another that saw Marsh offer his home so that Brooke could have a space of his own. While such narratives are interesting, some points made by Korda are made multiple times to the point of exhaustion.
Other examples of such overlap are the areas where Korda discusses the interactions between the soldier poets themselves. Robert Graves and Sassoon met each other while serving in the trenches on the Western Front, and Sassoon and Wilfred Owen—perhaps the most well-known soldier poet of the First World War—met while housed at the Craiglockhart Hospital. While such intersections explain why some of the same information appears to repeat throughout the book, better editing might have mitigated the amount of repetition.
Ultimately Muse of Fire is worth reading. Scholars and historians that may typically gravitate toward monographs on the First World War might be initially put off by the discussion of poetry and poets, but Korda does a great job of blending their stories with the conflicts and battles of the war. In narrating the history over a hundred years after the end of the war, Korda offers a fresh perspective on how the soldiers’ views on the conflict evolved.
Captain Branden Ventura-Miller, USAF