The presenter says he aims to convince BBC bosses to make a program about World War I poets such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke.
May hopes to make the program to coincide with this year's centenary of the outbreak of the Great War.
The 51-year-old said he had proposed the program to commissioning bosses at the BBC, which is preparing dozens of hours of shows to commemorate the anniversary with many more planned over the next four years.
In an interview for forces radio BFBS - recorded while visiting troops at Camp Bastion in Afghanistan for Top Gear - May said: "I've put it forward - I haven't heard from them yet, weirdly obviously this year is the centenary of the outbreak of World War I.
"But I thought for the first year we could commemorate the Christmas truce of 1914 when they all got out of the trenches and played football and swapped gifts and so on - and we could do that through the words of the war poets and the people who kept diaries and postcards and things.
"The words of the really big poets like Sassoon, (Edmund) Blunden and Owen have endured, while a lot of the other things about it, the understanding of it, is fading away - and those words may be the bit that survive the longest, and actually tell us a great deal about it in a very short space of time and very few words. Which is what poetry is about, it's about imagery and stuff."
May has hosted a number of his Toy Stories challenges and been on drink-inspired journeys with Oz Clarke for TV alongside his Top Gear commitments.
