In the history of Western epistemology, there have been three influential actions of in defense of poetry, which all involve the social function of poetry and explain the relationship between poetry and history in different degrees. The action of in defense of poetry did not happen in the history of Chinese literature, the main reason is that there has always been a cultural tradition of a fusion of poetry and history in ancient China, the relationship between poetry and history is very close, and poetry has always had a high status in Chinese history, there is no need to defend poetry. The development process of modern Chinese poetry is very tortuous and changeable, which contains the discussion of the relationship between modern Chinese poetry and history, and the relationship between modern Chinese poetry and history shows different faces in different historical periods. During the stage of occurrence of modern poetry in the 1920s, Guo Moruo and Li Jinfa imitated Western romanticism and symbolism poetry by integrating modern science and technology elements and learning from the western deep psychological mechanism, respectively, which opened the curtain of epistemology of Chinese modern poetry. In the 1930s, Bian Zhilin, as the representative of the combination of Western symbolism and Chinese classical poetry, combined the ancient and European comparative thinking between China and the West to further promote the epistemology. In the 1940s, Mu Dan and Feng Zhi pushed the epistemology of modern poetry to a new height from the combination of subconscious and Buddhist epistemology and the combination of body aesthetics and deep aesthetic psychology. Since the 1980s, Chinese modern poetry criticism has realized the importance of the historical view of modern poetry. Chen Chao and Geng Zhanchun put forward the paths of individual-historical rhetoric and different writing respectively, and explored the realistic historical view of contemporary poetry for contemporary poetry criticism from the perspective of history and the present. How to distinguish and define the relationship between modern poetry and history has come out. With the separation between contemporary poetry creation and poetry criticism and the improvement of poetic epistemology, the necessity of in defense of poetry has been highlighted. With the development of modern poetry, the concept of intentionality in phenomenology is effectively introduced, and the research of psychoanalysis and psychological mechanism of cogito and reflection can expand the epistemological research path of modern poetry in the view of history.