“Historians and Poetry: W.H. Auden’s Homage to Cleo”

A conflict between historians and poets (and Poetry and History) was set up by Aristotle in the third century BCE – and it’s still active.
Carolyn Steedman’s talk explores history and poetry (literature) as forms of thinking, feeling and writing in the modern world through the lens of W.H. Auden’s cycle of history poems, written in the Cold War era and published in Homage to Clio in 1960.
What is the use of poetry to historians? Was W. H. Auden `a kind of historian’? And even if he wasn’t, what did he have to say the meaning and practice of modern history?