A01=Michael Korda
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alan seeger
anti-war
Author_Michael Korda
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Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=BGL
Category=DC
Category=DCC
Category=DNBL
Category=DSC
Category=HBLW
Category=HBWN
Category=NHWR5
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
doomed youth
dulce et decorum est
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frontline
great war
isaac rosenberg
Language_English
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rear-guard
robert graves
rupert brooke
shell shock
siegfried sassoon
softlaunch
trench poem
war poem
wilfred owen
world war i
ww1
Product details
- ISBN 9781631496882
- Weight: 686g
- Dimensions: 160 x 236mm
- Publication Date: 16 Apr 2024
- Publisher: W W Norton & Co Ltd
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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Michael Korda, the best-selling author of Hero and Alone, tells the story of the First World War not in any conventional way but through the intertwined lives of the soldier poets who came to describe it best, and indeed to symbolize 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. With bitter irony, Owen’s mother received the telegram informing her of his death on November 11, just as church bells tolled to celebrate the war’s end.
Korda’s dramatic account, which includes anecdotes from his own family history, 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. His cast of characters includes the young American poet Alan Seeger, who was killed in action as a private in the French Foreign Legion; Isaac Rosenberg, whose parents had fled czarist anti-Semitic persecution and who was killed in action at the age of twenty-eight before his fame as a poet and a painter was recognised; Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, whose friendship and friendly rivalry endured through long, complicated private lives; and, finally, Owen, whose fame came only posthumously and whose poetry remains some of the most savage and heartbreaking to emerge from the cataclysmic war.
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, with his journey to Polynesia in pursuit of a life like Gauguin’s and some of his finest poetry written only a year before his tragic death. 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, from the revival of brutal trench warfare in Ukraine and in the Middle East.
Michael Korda participated in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and was awarded the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary. He is the author of major biographies of Ulysses S. Grant, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Robert E. Lee., as well as the best-selling memoir Charmed Lives.
