This book is a revised and augmented version of Muse e modelli: la poesia ellenistica da Alessandro Magno ad Augusto (Rome–Bari 2002). In the Preface of the Italian book we drew attention to the sympathy which one might expect the modern age to have for a literature which was self-consciously belated, in which meaning was created by a confrontation, both direct and oblique, with the classical works of the past. It is perhaps no great surprise that some critics have even seen in Hellenistic poetry a ludic ‘post-modern’ enterprise. ‘Modernity’, however, has its own history, particularly in the poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it is against that background that poets such as Callimachus and Theocritus first came to be seen as ‘modernists’ avant la lettre, practitioners of an experimental and virtuoso art for art's sake. The catalyst for such views came, often enough, from the emphasis in Wilhelm Kroll's seminal studies on ‘Kreuzung der Gattungen’ and effects of surprise in Hellenistic and Roman poetry. The phenomena to which Kroll pointed are real enough, and are given deserved prominence in this book, but his insights – and particularly his most famous catch-phrase – have too often been used as a substitute for serious analysis and hard thinking about the complexity of the Hellenistic engagement with the past.