Muse of Fire: World War I As Seen through the Lives of the Soldier Poets Audiobook

The First World War comes to harrowing life through the intertwined lives of the soldier-poets in this epic.

Michael Korda, the bestselling author of Alone and Hero, here takes a unique approach to World War I by telling its history through the lives of the soldier-poets whose verses memorialize the war's unimaginable horrors.

He begins with Rupert Brooke and the halcyon days before violence engulfed his generation—destroying the self-contented world of Edwardian England—and ends with the tragic death of Wilfred Owen, killed only days before the armistice brought an end to a war that took over 25,000,000 lives.

In a sweeping narrative that echoes The Guns of August, Korda recounts these four years of a civilization destroying itself and portrays the lives and anguished deaths of the young men who unforgettably illuminated it.

As is demonstrated by the success of Pat Barker's Regeneration, the remake of All Quiet on the Western Front, and by the images of brutal trench warfare in today's Ukraine, contemporary interest in "the war to end war" remains high.

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“Tracing each man’s personal trajectory and their interactions with each other, Korda emphasizes the seductiveness of conflict and the fact that poets enjoyed an end-run around the military censors (and a massive readership).”

— Booklist (starred review)