If only those who send their nation’s youth to war would read Muse of Fire, World War I as seen Through the Lives of the Soldier Poets. Alas, they won’t. It is both homage and horror story.
The book carries the reader across several fronts – the disparate journeys that led these men to the killing fields of Europe, the blood-soaked chrysalis from which their words arose, the impact and legacy of their work and the profound sadness and despair wrought from cataclysmic destruction on people and societies.
But Muse of Fire is also rooted in the personal. Korda has, as he writes, lived in the shadow of the First World War. Both sides of his family served in it. From being a child in England to the present, he has worn a poppy in his coat or sweater every Armistice Day. Its significance and meaning was explained to him with such gravity that such was the impact it has stayed with him. In a sense, it lives in this book.
A first reaction to Muse of Fire could have been simply the question, why? Does the world need another book on the soldier poets of the First World War? Libraries and bookshelves, including mine, are simply heaving with biographies and histories on the subject. One could also query the lack of a conditional adjective in the title. The book is not definitive of the war’s soldier poets. It leaves out several, such as Edward Thomas, Ivor Gurney, John McCrae, Edmund Blunden, Charles Sorley and David Jones.
Korda has, however, in his choice painted a landscape of the interior and exterior worlds of the pre-war years that each poet – Rupert Brooke, Alan Seeger, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen – inhabited. After 1914, everything changed, utterly. Only Graves and Sassoon would survive the war and die of old age.
What separates this book from monumental works on the poets such as those by Jean Moorcroft Wilson, is that in its compactness of material it delivers a more immediate punch. This is in no small measure testament to the writing.
Korda, a former editor in chief of publisher Simon & Schuster and prolific writer, eloquently twines a thread through history and while his subjects are the poets, equally the book is about the pity of war. A pity that runs, lamentably, through the ages. He confesses that he is not a literary critic. The poems are not taken apart and analysed. Instead they are held up to the light, brought into the context of their times.
'It is surely a condemnation of the failings of politics that we have come to regard the suffering of civilians, the millions of deaths and injured, as collateral damage. Never has a phrase meant so little as ‘never again’ in the sanctity of the innocent of equal value as the defeat of the enemy.'
Korda writes in the epilogue: ‘History is a chronicle not of new events, but of old ones re-emerging in a different form. The war that killed Rupert Brooke, Alan Seeger, Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen also destroyed three empires and created a large number of new nations in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, many with borders that are still being fought over.
‘We still live among its ruins, groping with the problems that the war created and the peace that followed it failed to resolve, or that it solved in ways that only guaranteed more fighting . . . it is not even a futuristic war such as H.G. Wells might have imagined but mostly the same old story of mud, artillery barrages, barbed wire high explosives, machine guns and tanks. Wilfred Owen and his fellow poets would have been quite at home in the outskirts of Kyiv and no doubt just as angry at the waste and death as a substitute for diplomacy, negotiation and the rarest of human values, commonsense.’
It is surely a condemnation of the failings of politics that we have come to regard the suffering of civilians, the millions of deaths and injured, as collateral damage. Never has a phrase meant so little as ‘never again’ in the sanctity of the innocent of equal value as the defeat of the enemy.
Muse of Fire is also a time capsule of the society of the day 110 years ago when the war started. He begins with Rupert Brooke, who sailed into the glory of war without having experienced it. He died not from battle wounds but of sepsis on a French hospital ship on the way to Gallipoli in 1915. Brooke had already found fame with his poem The Soldier, published the year he died.
‘If should die, think only this of me:/That there’s some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England.’
It was a sentiment that captured the mood of the nation before the industrial slaughter of the battlefields became known.
American Alan Seeger also went to war with stars in his eyes. He served with the French Foreign Legion in France, and died from a bullet wound in 1916. He is compared in his verse to Brooke, often clothing the deprivations of war with the heroics of the fight.
The remaining poets Rosenberg, Graves, Sassoon and Owen were the heralds of a hell never before encountered in war. Their poetry was akin to news reports of today’s witnesses to war. Korda gathers their lives and words into a glimmering tapestry of what humanity is capable, of its beauty and its wretchedness.
The First World War was termed both the Great War and the War to End All Wars. People couldn’t imagine what was to come. History proved humanity was capable of repeating itself. The war poets described hell. While their art remains, alas, so too does each new fresh hell that war creates.
And the grim anthem played over and over again for doomed youth.
Warwick McFadyen is an award-winning journalist. He has won two Walkley Awards and four Quill Awards. He has published several books of poetry. The latest is 21+4 Poems. His prose and poems have also appeared in Quadrant, Overland and Dissent.