The project of this book is to investigate how poetry and the figure of the poet are represented, discussed, contested within the poetry of ancient Greece. It is a vast subject and some markers of my procedure may prove helpful at the outset. There are three major strands of analysis that link the studies that follow. First, I set out to chart how the (self-) representation of the poet's voice implicates a wide series of questions about authority in language, access to knowledge, and the representation of humans in society. (For an adequate study of the poet's voice cannot be limited to describing the institutions of poetic production within a culture or to collecting the passages of ancient writing where poets are portrayed or the performance/writing of poetry is explicitly discussed.) Second, I explore how an awareness of other poets' poetry – an awareness displayed in parody, allusion, rewriting – is a fundamental dynamic of the construction of the poet's voice within a literary tradition. Third, my arguments return to the varied problems that arise from poetry's focus on its own workings – the self-reflexiveness inherent in such poetic self-representation. These three interrelated topics, which could be termed the problems of representation, intertextuality and self-reflexiveness, form an integral part of trying to discover the position from which the poet's voice speaks – and together connect the separate studies of this book.