Abstract:

Hayden White, a well-known American historian, in his book Metahistory: Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, discusses the great similarities between history and literature in terms of discourse and the difficulties of an objective historical narrative with the idea that history is a kind of literary fiction. According to the famous historian, while dealing with history, a historian picks up specific events that he considers important in the historical process and presents them to the reader by fictionalizing them through literature. White states that the historian makes his narrative more interesting and meaningful by using rhetoric in literature. Just like literature in historical texts, it is possible to encounter historical expressions in literary texts. In this respect, a historical text can be a literary work, just as a literary work can be read as a work of history. This study aims to analyse W.H. Auden’s controversial poem, Spain, which was written during the Spanish Civil War with some ideological impulses. It aims to reveal how the historical narrative of the poem constitutes the ideological discourse of the text.

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