Liveright
Review by David Starkey
“Reading about how a succession of relatively small misjudgments and poor decisions can lead, with surprising speed, to human catastrophe on an unimaginable scale should, if nothing else, make us wonder how much progress we have made in diplomacy and statecraft, if any, since June 1914,” Michael Korda writes in the epilogue of his new book, Muse of Fire: World War I As Seen Through the Lives of the Soldier Poets. It’s clear that Korda doesn’t find our era much different than the cataclysmic years of the War to End All Wars: “Wilfred Owen and his fellow poets would have been quite at home on the outskirts of Kyiv, and no doubt angry at the waste and death on a large scale as a substitute for diplomacy, negotiation, and the rarest of human values, common sense.” It’s a depressing conclusion to a gloomy book, though one worth reading nonetheless.
Korda does do a nice job of showing the sunny side of England prior to 1914 by conjuring up the pre-war lives of the poets. On balance, once they are beyond childhood, the poets have pretty comfortable lives, sometimes to the point of tedium. Sure, there is the usual public (i.e., private) school bullying, and the awkward experiments with homosexuality that leave the participants emotionally at sea at a time when gay sex was punishable with a prison sentence, but there’s also lots of hiking and camping, swapping poems and playing rugby, not to mention summer lawn parties with dancing late into the night.
Despite his proclivity for minor illnesses, Rupert Brooke, especially, lived a charmed existence. Handsome, clever, charismatic, with an easy gift for writing verse, he seems beloved by almost everyone. In his mid-twenties, everything appeared to be going his way. In addition to publishing his poems in prestigious journals, his pre-war experiences included travels in America and an amorous voyage to Tahiti. Indeed, Muse of Fire, which devotes more than a third of its pages to Brooke, feels as though it might have begun as a biography of England’s golden soldier-poet, who penned the lines, “If should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England.” Brooke’s war sonnets, Korda remarks, “expressed what other people were feeling. He embodied the national spirit perfectly, in poetry that gave dignity and grace to the sacrifice and suffering of war.”
From a narrative standpoint, though, Brooke is all prelude. He died in 1915 of sepsis from a mosquito bite on a French hospital ship without ever reaching the bloody shores of Gallipoli. Moreover, his poems of idealism and valor look positively naïve when compared with the work of the poets who followed him and actually served in the trenches. Appropriately, Muse of Fire picks up momentum when we meet these true war poets: Alan Seeger, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, and of course Wilfred Owen, arguably the most talented of the group.
Each of these poets faced their own issues in battle. Seeger, an American, had his native optimism slowly ground down by the filth and callousness of his senior comrades in the French Foreign Legion. Growing up impoverished, Rosenberg wrestled with class-conscious officers and pervasive anti-Semitism. Shy and a little prudish, Graves found it difficult to enter the bawdy, rough and tumble world of soldiers. Sassoon grappled with leading troops into battle while harboring an “intense disgust at the war and…anger at how the lives of the soldiers were being wasted by military incompetence.” And Owen, whose PTSD, like Sassoon’s, was so intense that he spent a period of time recovering at Craiglockhart, a “hydropathic” psychiatric hospital in Edinburgh, struggled to balance his bravery with his loathing of the war.
“I am not a literary critic,” Korda acknowledges, “nor is this a book about poetry as such.” No doubt, the author’s lack of literary training spares the reader a great deal of technical and theoretical blather. However, one can’t help but wish there was a bit more critical acumen in the readings of the poems, which focus primarily on their content. Granted, that content is powerful, as Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” makes plain. Yet in this poem alone, there is so much to say about rhyme and alliteration, enjambment and imagery, that even a little explication would have gone a long way. One also misses a chapter on Edward Thomas, an incredibly talented poet killed at Arras in 1917.
Nevertheless, Muse of Fire accomplishes what it sets out to do: it makes war seem not just chaotic and cruel, but absolutely unnecessary. Korda writes with great sympathy for his subjects and great scorn for the political and industrial powers that put these young men in harm’s way. Unfortunately, it’s a dynamic we seem doomed to ignore or forget.
