I would like to extend my thanks to the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, the Sub-Faculty of Byzantine and Modern Greek at the University of Oxford, and the British Comparative Literature Association, for providing the generous grants that have made this publication possible. This project started life as a doctoral thesis and as such owes the greatest of debts to my principal PhD supervisor, Professor Michael Worton, of University College London, for his constant support and unstinting intellectual involvement. I have benefited a great deal from our collaboration, but most of all, I have learnt not to be afraid to turn my enthusiasm into concrete arguments. Professor Dimitris Tziovas, of the University of Birmingham, also provided invaluable input in his capacity as external supervisor — and offered me a friendship that has survived well beyond this project. Over the years, I have benefited from illuminating discussions with Annette Lavers and Jane Cowan (my doctoral examiners), Alexis Politis, Ere Stavropoulou, Christopher Robinson, Dionysis Savvopoulos, Roderick Beaton, Eleni Politou-Marmarinou, Angela Kastrinake, Anna Stamatopoulou, Giannis Petridis, the late Tasos Falireas, Gail Holst, Constanze Güthenke, Peter Mackridge, Elizabeth and Michael Jeffreys, Kyra Paraschaki and Elias Kyvelos, as well as my students at UCL and Oxford. Initial research for this project was funded by a grant in Comparative Literature from IKY, the Greek State Scholarship Foundation, and completed with the help of small grants from the A.G. Leventis Foundation and the Friends Programme, UCL. Travel grants at various stages were provided by the Phylis Palmer Travel Fund, UCL Graduate School, the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at Oxford. An Andrew Mellon postdoctoral fellowship in the Humanities (UCL) allowed me to rethink the focus of this book, but also gave me the necessary freedom to pursue other projects while taking some distance from this one. This was also a characteristic of the first year of my appointment as University Lecturer in the Faculty of Modern Languages at Oxford. I am grateful to numerous colleagues and friends at both Oxford and UCL for their support. At Legenda, my manuscript benefited immensely from editorial яomments and suggestions offered by Professor Peter France and the anonymous reader, as well as from Polly Fallows’s careful editing and Graham Nelson’s precision, goodwill and patience. I should also like to thank Martin McLaughlin and Stephen Parkinson for their advice. I have always linked my experience of Savvopoulos’s music to Alexis Kyritsopoulos’s marvellous paintings and sketches. Thus, I feel extremely honoured to be able to reproduce one of them on the cover of this book. The sketch, comprising different versions of a songwriter dancing in a neverending sequence, encompasses all I tried to say with the notion of the singing poet. I am grateful to the artist for permission to reprint. My mother Konstantina Nanou and my sister Eleni Syminelaki-Nanou have always been there, my most consistent points of reference. Finally, this book is the fruit, in more than one ways, of my life with William McEvoy. It feels as if I owe him every single word here — and much much more.