The First World War comes to harrowing life through the intertwined lives of the soldier poets in Michael Korda's epic Muse of Fire. 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 civilization 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.         416 pages  pb