Poetic Identity in Guillaume de Machaut

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Though it must be measured by the limitations it is encompassed by, the key passage of Book I of Endymion, written in the spring and early summer of 1817, constitutes an answer to the young poet’s question, “Wherein lies happiness?” That answer, couched in poetry occasionally mawkish and marred by the rhyming demands of the couplet-form, nevertheless advances an important theme. Sending along a revision of his initial attempt, Keats, in a letter of 30 January 1818, told his publisher, John Taylor: “I assure you that when I wrote it, it was a regular stepping stone of the Imagination towards a Truth. My having written that Argument will perhaps be the greatest Service to me of anything I ever did—It set before me at once the gradations of Happiness even like a kind of Pleasure Thermometer” ( Letters 1:218-19). Answering his own question in the poem, Keats tells us that happiness lies The question of the ‘truth’ of biological data and the authenticity promised by a blood sample ran through debates about the new biology and genetics in the 1960s. It lies at the heart of Antin’s project, anticipating discussions that surrounded genetic discoveries in the late 1960s and 1970s and onwards, which focused on moral and ontological questions as much as medical ones. Antin’s approach to the issue of the relationship between blood and identity is similarly philosophical in its focus on poetic personality and skill, and it combines the pervasive though non-specific influence of the new biology with a romantic notion of the artist as genius. ‘I was sort of kidding around at first with the idea of the artist’s soul, his life’s blood’, she has explained. ‘So what, who, is a poet? I mean, what could be more basic than blood? Now they’d say DNA, so today you could say my blood box is a treasure trove of poet DNA … But blood has a poetry to it that DNA doesn’t have.’ 19 CSP: Some of it began with land dispossession: When the United States first annexed Guam from Spain, they expropriated like half of the island’s landmass — oftentimes evicting families from land they had been on for generations, including some of my family’s own ancestral lands. And then what they did with those lands is they turned them into military bases. One of the collateral damages of that is that there’s a lot of environmental pollution due to military testing, military waste, weapons storage.

The final word on each line within a stanza rhymes: hands/lands/stands and crawls/walls/falls. A rhyme scheme of AAA BBB. AT: If you don’t have a national identity, what would you consider your identity in terms of where you’re from or what you’re connected to? Most Facing History units begin with an exploration of the relationship between the individual and society, how that relationship influences our identities, and how it affects the choices we make. Poetry can provide a powerful point of entry into that exploration. To help students grapple with the complexities of identity, consider teaching one or more of the following poems from Facing History resources, in which poets write about the challenges they face navigating dual identities. Sinfield, A. (1994) The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Moment (New York: Columbia University Press). Thain, M. (2007) ‘Poetry’, in G. Marshall (ed.), Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 223–240.

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AT: Are you doing anything else in the literary world in relation to identity or to highlight your culture/community within the larger American context?

The first stanza describes the eagle perched high on the mountain and the second stanza describes it swooping down. Breaking the poem into two separate events helps to increase the drama. The theme of identity is imbued throughout the poem, even though the word itself does not appear. This functions as a microcosm of the poem’s message, as the sum of your experiences and personality become your identity even though each individual moment appears negligible. The poet suggests that a person’s identity can evolve like a plant if nurtured a certain way, even though it began as a seed like the others. This reminds the reader that their identity is not passive but rather something they can shape and influence. The student is frustrated with the education that he is receiving; he wants to know about his own heritage and history.

The sui generis contrast is explicitly conspicuous throughout the poem, and the use of metaphorical, hyperbolic language is used to emphasize the unimaginable contentment that comes from individuality, despite the fact that it might at the same time mean being neglected and isolated. In this way, the speaker established an identity of his own and proclaims himself as a strong and free individual. The individual names of the soldiers who were fought as part of the Light Brigade, are not know. They are always referred to as a collective group: Such hints should be accepted gratefully, not least because they are creatively productive (As Blake put it, using “Keatsian” imagery: “The thankful receiver bears a plentiful harvest.”) To irritably reject them because they cannot be fitted into a larger scheme—“knowledge of what is to be arrived at,” a system of one’s own making—amounts to an egoistic assertion and projection of one’s own identity. Of Dilke, “disquisition” with whom launched these thoughts, Keats later said he “was a Man who cannot feel he has a personal identity unless he has made up his mind about every thing. The only means of strengthening one’s intellect is to make up one’s mind about nothing—to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts…Dilke will never come at a truth as long as he lives; because he is always trying at it.” ( Letters 2:213). CSP: I don’t really consider myself an American. Partly because Guam is what’s called an “unincorporated territory,” which is another way of saying Guam is a colonial possession of the United States. So in that sense, we’re not really Americans — but we’re also U.S. citizens. We’re not fully a part of America. So for me, personally, it’s hard to feel American, and I definitely don’t feel proud to be an American colony. Especially because the United States has had a negative impact on our island and our culture since 1898. Looking at the layout of a poem and listening for sound patterns – particularly rhyme and rhythm – helps to identify the form.

The relationships upon which identity is formed emerge in two ways in Antin’s box: firstly, the project represents a series of intimate exchanges between the artist and her subjects, defined by the element of trust that comes with drawing the blood of another. Such exchanges were inevitably dependent on friendship, acquaintance, professional respect, careful negotiation, or some combination of these. Antin has described this careful diplomacy, referring to the element of charm and persuasion that was necessary, especially in the early stages of the project, and recounting not only those exchanges that were successfully brokered, but also those that fell through. 12Naden, C. (1997) ‘Love’s Mirror’ (1894)’, in R. K. R. Thornton and M. Thain (eds), Poetry of the 1890s (London: Penguin), p. 27. Mermin, D. (1986) ‘The Damsel, the Knight, and the Victorian Woman Poet’, Critical Inquiry, 13 (1), 64–80.