Auden and Shamlou's Subversive Voices against Capitalism: A New Historicist Study
Nastran Bandehkhodaei

Abstract
Under the influence of their main advocate, Stephen Greenblatt, the new historicist critics have almost always argued that in the interactions between literary texts and their socio-political milieu, texts act rebelliously to highlight the falsifications hidden beneath the verisimilitude of the accepted reality of an era. Applying such a remark on the poems of W. H. Auden and Ahmad Shamlou—the former being a British poet, and the latter an Iranian poet—the researcher aims to display how chosen poems of these two poets act subversively to show up what claims to be hidden beneath the reality of a socio-historical culture called capitalism. In fact, in the present study, the researcher shows how the two poets provide the readers not with the fantasy of growth and improvement—these being advertised by the capitalists' authorities—but with the despondencies that the capitalist system has brought about for the people.

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