SOURCE: Attwood, Catherine. “The ‘I’ of the Poet and the Poetic ‘I’: The Evolution of Literary Awareness in Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries” and “The ‘I’ and the Other: The Poetic ‘I’ in the Works of Guillaume de Machaut.” In The Poetic “I” in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century French Lyric Poetry, pp. 11-228. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998.

In the following excerpt, Attwood analyzes Machaut's principal works concluding that he, more than any other poet of his time, reveals his poetic ego as a purely textual, literary construct.

Among the most significant contributions of the writers of this period to the development of the first-person lyric voice is their increasingly explicit differentiation between the poetic ‘I’ and the ‘I’ of the poet. By the first of these terms I wish to designate the first-person speaker as it appears in any lyric text, as distinct from the structuring consciousness or ‘implied poet’ which underlies...