Book Review: ‘Muse of Fire,’ by Michael Korda

MUSE OF FIRE: World War I as Seen Through the Lives of the Soldier Poets, by Michael Korda

It is chillingly plain that the young, fashionable English poet Rupert Brooke had romanticized the great bloodletting that was about to happen. “Come and die,” he wrote to a friend in 1915, during the first winter of World War I. “It will be great fun.”

A few weeks later, he had dinner at 10 Downing Street with some of his admirers, including the first lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. Brooke fell in love with Churchill’s plan to capture Constantinople. He did not predict what that effort would actually entail: over 100,000 British and Commonwealth casualties, and his own anticlimactic death following an infected mosquito bite before he had even reached the fighting.

The British government filtered most forms of media during the First World War. A new book argues that there was an exception: poetry. As the novelist and editor Michael Korda writes in “Muse of Fire,” an erudite and often funny group biography of the Allied soldiers who turned their battlefield experiences into verse, “Nobody considered that celebrated soldier poets might one day turn against the war.”

The soldiers he follows represent the whole arc of public opinion as the war progressed: from the enthusiasm of Brooke and Alan Seeger, to the resigned disgust of Isaac Rosenberg and Robert Graves, to the incandescent rage of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.

At the start of the war, Brooke seemed exactly the sort of nationalist martyr Britain needed. A great many young people would have to die, so it came in handy to have a national poet who could glorify youthful death with such stirring and eternal lines as “If I should die, think only this of me:/That there’s some corner of a foreign field/That is forever England.”

Korda sets the intimate details of Brooke’s story, jewel-like, amid the larger context of a Europe on the blind precipice of catastrophe. These early chapters have all the delicious elements of a Dark Academia novel that might blow up on BookTok: secret societies; homosexual undercurrents; left-wing politics; scandalous letters (“Oh, my god, I want you so tonight. Your nakedness and beauty — your mouth and breast.”); a dazzlingly handsome man who appears to be careless of his great beauty; and, above all, a terror of aging, an ironic and ominous wish to die young.

The Brooke section is especially preoccupied with providing a salacious view into his chaotic sex life. As a 23-year-old in Munich in 1911, Brooke asked his friend, the future psychoanalyst James Strachey (whom Brooke once surprised by emerging from an afternoon swim with a full erection), for advice about contraception; he wished to seduce a certain “damp young sculptress.”

Strachey responded with a long, illustrated note, Korda writes, “on the comparative merits of condoms, pessaries and syringes.” He ended his letter with: “Oh, but isn’t it all too incredibly filthy? Won’t it perhaps make you sick of it? — Come quietly to bed with me instead.”

As Brooke’s biography went on — and on; there are so many different women for him to harass — I became increasingly convinced that he was, at best, a sex pest, and, at worst, completely repugnant. Korda depicts him with humor, sympathizing with Brooke’s unfortunate female victims.

That said, the sheer number of pages given over to Brooke, who died without seeing much, if any, combat, is slightly bewildering — particularly in a history meant to show us the whole war in all its remorseless violence.

After Brooke’s death by mosquito bite, Korda turns his biographical powers to other poets. Seeger, an American who joined the French Foreign Legion, distinguished himself by showing an astonishingly sunny view of the war: a fellow legionnaire describes him as “beaming with joy” as they moved toward the Battle of the Somme.

The established narrative around war poets is that they join the fighting with boyish enthusiasm, and the gory reality prompts a change of view. But poets like Seeger challenge that narrative. Some men go to war and really do just like it. As Julian Grenfell, another war poet, famously wrote: “I adore war. It is like a big picnic without the objectlessness of a picnic. I’ve never been so well or so happy.” Both Seeger and Grenfell were killed in World War I.

Isaac Rosenberg appears as a breath of fresh air after all these upper-class happy warrior types. Rosenberg was Jewish, the son of a Russian immigrant who became a traveling peddler (“only one step above a tramp,” Korda writes), and he grew up in what Korda describes as Dickensian poverty. He joined the war for prosaic reasons: He needed money.

Rosenberg’s poetry shows a resigned acceptance of discomfort in the trenches: “The wheels lurched over sprawled dead/But pained them not, though their bones crunched.” Perhaps he sensed that he did not have the class capital that was needed to attack the powers behind the war and survive unscathed. Of course, he didn’t survive anyway.

By contrast, Graves and Sassoon were exactly the sort of young men who were supposed to make up the officer corps of the British Army — “middle-class, well educated, physically fit, enthusiastic, brave and willing to take enormous personal risks and to lead their men in battle,” Korda observes — which made their furious poetry remarkable.

In its breadth, the book occasionally lacks depth when it comes to probing the complex emotions behind its subjects’ verses. Korda is hand-wavy about Sassoon’s relationship with Judaism, for instance, interpreting a famous line from a letter Sassoon wrote to Graves (“Yes, you can touch my Banker when you need him./Why keep a Jewish friend unless you bleed him?”) to suggest this was a joke that illustrates how little Sassoon’s Jewishness “occupied his attention.”

Yet the joke seems too barbed to be really funny — it mirrors the kind of caustic humor Sassoon uses when talking about the war; he was often most flippant when he felt angriest.

Korda’s claim about the singular integrity of poetry during the war is also perhaps overstated — Sassoon, for instance, seems to have toned down his disgust with British brutality at the end of the war in his poem “Atrocities.” Still, Korda’s group portrait of soldier poets skillfully depicts how different classes of men experienced the Western Front and offers an entry point into a rich seam of under-read war poetry.

It’s an overarching picture, and yet, no poem can really make its audience understand the nature of war. It can give only a bitter taste, enough to teach readers to treasure their ignorance, as Sassoon angrily urged cheering crowds to do in 1918:

Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

MUSE OF FIRE: World War I as Seen Through the Lives of the Soldier Poets | By Michael Korda | Liveright | 381 pp. | $29.99