Hayden white (1928-) is a famous contemporary American intellectual historian, historical philosopher and literary critic. After 1960, he set foot in the field of historical philosophy and is one of the most famous historical philosophers in the contemporary west. Before retiring, he taught at California State University, Santa Cruz. He widely absorbed the research results of philosophy, literature, linguistics and other disciplines, constructed a set of metaphor theory to analyze historical texts, authors and readers, and revealed various ways in which ideological factors intervened in history. White led the linguistic turn in the field of historical philosophy after 1970s, and introduced historicism into the field of literary criticism, which became a model of interdisciplinary research. Hayden white's masterpiece Meta-History is regarded as the most important historical philosophy work in the second half of the 20th century, and it also marks the linguistic turn of contemporary western historical philosophy research. There is no completely broken gap between history and poetry. Any historical work contains a deep structure, which is essentially poetic and linguistic, and is an uncritically accepted paradigm. The author uses formalism to construct structuralist text analysis theory, and pays attention to the implementation of historicism. He analyzes eight representative historical thinkers in the19th century one by one with ironic metaphor strategy, showing readers their dominant metaphors and accompanying language rules when writing historical works, thus confirming the poetic nature of historical works. Academic circles highly value White's academic position, and think that his exposition on narrative and historical interpretation, narrative and human action, narrative and (socio-economic) structure, narrative and historical reality has "become the core and frontier concern of contemporary historical philosophy", and "narrative historical philosophy initiated by White has reopened a brand-new platform for traditional historical philosophy".