Muse of Fire

Michael Korda, the best-selling author of Hero and Alone, tells the story of the First World War but through the intertwined lives of the soldier poets who came to describe it best, and indeed to symbolise the war’s tragic arc and lethal fury. His epic narrative begins with Rupert Brooke, “the handsomest young man in England” and perhaps its most famous young poet in the halcyon days of the Edwardian Age, and ends five years later with Wilfred Owen, killed in action at twenty-five, only one week before the armistice. Korda’s dramatic account not only brings to life the soldier poets but paints an unforgettable picture of life and death in the trenches, and the sacrifice of an entire generation. As Korda demonstrates, the poets of the First World War were soldiers, heroes, martyrs, victims, their lives and loves endlessly fascinating—that of Rupert Brooke alone reads like a novel. Muse of Fire is at once a portrait of their lives and a narrative of a civilisation destroying itself, among the rubble, shadows, and the unresolved problems of which we still live.