The First World War comes to harrowing life through the intertwined lives of the soldier-poets in Michael Korda's epic Muse of Fire . With Muse of Fire , Michael Korda, the bestselling author of Alone and Hero , takes a novel 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 the success of Pat Barker's Regeneration , the remake of All Quiet on the Western Front , and the images of brutal trench warfare in today's Ukraine demonstrate, contemporary interest in "the war to end war" remains high.