History and literature are both forms of writing, they propose - each in a different way- an interpretation of the real happenings. However, literature is open to fiction unlike history which must pay attention to documentary and other evidences about past events. While novelist, play-writers and poets can add details such as places, time and people, historians can’t. Although historians and novelist in realist writings has things in common but there will always be an overlap between the two kinds of writing.
Poetry is closer to prose fiction as novels than it to a historical writing. It does not always seek to represent history. Therefore, there cannot be anything programmatic about this relationship between poetry and history. But, although poets do not speak simply of an historical event they describe themselves and their own feelings and experiences in a historical situation, for example, ’North’ by Seamus Heaney and ‘Requiem’ by Anna Akhmatova.
’Requiem’
By Anna Akhmatova
Akhmatova was born at Bolshoi Fontan in Odessa on the black sea coast. Soon after she was born her family moved to Tsarskoye Selo near St Petersburg, the village in which the Russians imperial family had their summer residence before the revolution of 1917. In 1910, she married the poet, Nikolay Gumilyov, who very soon left her for lion hunting in Africa, heir son, Lev, born in 1912, was to become a famous Neo-Eurasianist historian. The growing distaste which the personal and religious elements in her poetry aroused in Soviet officialdom forced her thereafter into long periods of silence; and the poetic masterpieces of her later years, A Poem without a Hero and Requiem, were published abroad.
Rekviem (1963), translated into English as Requiem, is the one of the best known works of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. The composition consists of a series of numerous short poems that reflect the anguish of the Russian people during years of persecution and purges...