In his Prologue, Guillaume de Machaut lists the ballade entée, or ‘grafted ballade’, as one of the many genres he is inspired to write to praise and honour all ladies. It is unclear from this fleeting reference, however, exactly what type of work Machaut meant by this term and whether he was referring to a purely poetic form or to one that involved music. That the practice of citation in lyric poetry was well established at this time is demonstrated by Machaut's own output, which reveals him to have been a master of this art; this literary tradition was to continue to thrive in the later fourteenth century.