Identity

Though published in the 1970s, Noboa Polanco’s “Identity” shares very little in common with the Modernist and Confessional poetry that appeared both before and after its publication. The 1940s and 1950s saw an influx of Modernist themes like objectivity and impersonality, traits born from generations whose previous beliefs systems and livelihoods were upended by wars. Modernists like T.S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein wrote weighty, heavily symbolic work that mirrored internal states of being. As a reaction to Modernism, the Confessional poets of the 1950s and 1960s, who can be further broken down by time periods, location, thematic concerns, and styles, most notably sought to make poetry personal again. Poets like Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell reintroduced the “I” into poems (along with “taboo” subjects like mental illness, sex, and desires). Confessional poetry also fits into Postmodernist poetry, which is poetry that rebels against strict rules and set meanings. “Identity,” with its emphasis on individuality and nonconformity, easily fits into the postmodern tradition of poetics that seeks to break down “universal” truths or meanings.

The poem also fits comfortably within the American Romantic tradition. The poem’s use of free verse, its emphasis on nature as a metaphor for human life, and its focus on originality make it a descendant of the work of American writers like Walt Whitman, whose “Song of Myself” foreshadows many of the formal and poetic qualities of Noboa Polanco’s work. Whitman, for instance, would have praised both the flower and the weed (and he did in Leaves of Grass), seeing mental and physical beauty in something that others find lowly. The American Romantics, like their worldly counterparts, favored emotion, passion, nature, and idealism. The natural and botanical metaphors that Noboa Polanco employs therefore align the poem with this historical period of poetry.

The idea of childhood is also very important to the Romantic poets. They could even be argued to be the creators of the modern notion of childhood as a time when the child should be free to explore and navigate the world as an innocent creature. Though it is not evident in the poem itself, it is interesting in this context that Noboa Polanco wrote the poem as a child in the eighth grade.

Though Noboa Polanco’s poem borrows heavily from American and European Romanticism, “Identity” also subverts many of the tropes common in those traditions. The choice to focus on weeds instead of flowers, for instance, is a modern inversion of a more typical Romantic lyric. This is one example of the poem’s postmodern influence cropping up: Noboa Polanco’s poem questions why people define flowers as beautiful and not weeds. Likewise, the relative importance of beauty to the poem’s speaker, who prefers instead ugly individualism, goes against the Romantic grain. Again, the beauty that Romantic poet John Keats sees in a Grecian urn or in a nightingale is the same beauty that Noboa Polanco sees in weeds. Noboa Polanco appreciates and understands his literary ancestry, but he opens the playing field by embracing nonconformity and by bringing cultural awareness into the field of poetics.