From The Wall Street Journal:
World War I has passed out of living memory, but its carnage remains seared in our minds. For the writer Michael Korda, “we still live amid its ruins, its errors of judgment, and its fatal consequences.” If we don’t easily forget the vivid details and images of the Western Front—the no-man’s-land danger zones, the squalid trenches and quagmire battlefields, the individual suffering and wholesale slaughter—this is in great part due to the poets who experienced it and then, in their own way, conveyed it. “The rank stench of those bodies haunts me still, / And I remember things I’d best forget,” wrote Siegfried Sassoon in 1916.
A year later, in one of the most famous poems from the war, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” Wilfred Owen described a recurring vision of a soldier dying in a gas attack: “In all my dreams before my helpless sight, / He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.” That vision would only have tormented Owen until 1918: He was killed in action on Nov. 4, a week before the armistice.
In his book “Muse of Fire,” Mr. Korda explores the lives—most of them short—of six men, five of them British, who went to war and presented it in their poems as either a glorious, heroic enterprise or, as hostilities ground on, a relentless, merciless hell. The latter perspective was available to readers, the author explains, because unlike photographs, letters and newspaper reports from the front line, poems about the war were not censored. Mr. Korda, who has written numerous books about men at war, expertly traces his poets’ shifts in outlook and subject matter, and along the way showcases candid, visceral verse that has lost none of its power to shock and move.
The first poet in the spotlight is Rupert Brooke, who made a name for himself before war broke out. Handsome, athletic, intelligent and well-connected, Brooke wrote popular patriotic poems about a serene, pastoral England—a green and pleasant land about to be transformed by the cataclysm to come. Brooke greeted the conflict with enthusiasm, and his war sonnets that secured his reputation encouraged young men to embrace the cause and take the plunge, “as swimmers into cleanness leaping.” Not that Brooke was able to immerse himself. He died before he saw combat, from blood poisoning in 1915 on a ship bound for Gallipoli, and was buried on the Greek island of Skyros. Winston Churchill wrote his obituary, singling out his valor and his sacrifice. Some weeks before, the dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral had read Brooke’s poem “The Soldier” in his sermon from the pulpit. The first soldier poet to die in the war quickly became an effective recruitment tool for it.
Another poet who viewed the war as a grand adventure was New York-born Alan Seeger. Rudderless after graduating from Harvard, Seeger found direction and purpose when he moved to Paris and enlisted in the Foreign Legion to fight for France. “Amid the clash of arms I was at peace,” he wrote. He witnessed the fighting at its worst, both in battle and in the trenches, yet remained upbeat. “And it was our pride and boast to be / The instruments of Destiny,” he declared in his poem “The Hosts.” Killed in action in 1916, Seeger was the last of his kind to chase glory and paint the war in a favorable light. “After him,” notes Mr. Korda, “the poet’s task would be to describe what no one wanted to imagine and to speak what no one wanted to hear.”
Isaac Rosenberg carried out this task with aplomb. He joined the army in 1915 to escape poverty. He was picked on for being Jewish and was plagued by ill-health (according to Mr. Korda, the young man was only accepted for service because the government was “desperate for cannon fodder”). But Rosenberg accepted his lot and got on with the job of enduring the horrors of trench life. With lines like “The wheels lurched over sprawled dead / But pained them not, though their bones crunched” and “A man’s brains splattered on / A stretcher-bearer’s face” from one of his finest poems, “Dead Man’s Dump,” Rosenberg’s startlingly direct style matter-of-factly reflected the raw brutality of the soldier’s experience.
Mr. Korda’s chapters on Sassoon and Owen show how those poets developed an even tougher stance and wrote with anger, sadness and bitter sarcasm about the senseless loss of lives and the ignorance and incompetence of generals and politicians. In the pages that cover the men’s convalescence in Edinburgh, Mr. Korda gives a fascinating account of a budding friendship and charts Owen’s trajectory from a good poet to arguably the greatest of the World War I poets, and, what Mr. Korda calls, “the spokesman for a martyred generation.”
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Sorry if you encounter a paywall)
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.The Soldier by Rupert Brooke, first published in Poetry Magazine, April, 1915. Brooke died in combat on April 23, 1915
