This study focuses on the reception of tragedy and the tragic in Hellenistic poetry. It illustrates how classical tragedy and the tragic idea were incorporated in the poems of Callimachus and Theocritus, Apollonius’ Argonautica, the iambic Alexandra and late Hellenistic poetry. It demonstrates that ‘the tragic’ was not doomed to failure in the postclassical world but lived on through the works of the great Alexandrian poets and their followers.