The study of Hellenistic poetry in general and of Alexandrian poetry in particular ought to stand on the threshold of a golden period. On the one hand, there are the important accessions to our corpus of texts which the papyri have brought and which are now gathered in the splendid Supplementum Hellenisticum of Peter Parsons and Hugh Lloyd-Jones. Although it is only Callimachus who has been a big winner in terms of new texts, our sense of what is typical of the period has improved dramatically; it would be churlish to complain that Egypt has not necessarily given us what we would have wished. Moreover, many recent trends in literary criticism would seem to suit well a poetry as self-conscious as that of the high Alexandrian period, and there are indeed signs that these texts are now finding new and sympathetic readers. Nevertheless, some attempt must be made here to analyse the reasons for the generally poor critical reception of Alexandrian poetry in general and of the Argonautica in particular, both because future progress must have a context and because these reasons will explain many structural features of the present book. Four broad types of explanation – beyond the poor state of textual survival – may be identified; the types do, of course, overlap at many points.