This chapter introduces the key issues raised by the poetry of Hipponax. After assessing the available data on his life – his date, place of origin, and the implications of his name – we examine three life stories told by ancient sources, which potentially illustrate ancient receptions of his ‘autobiographical’ poetry. Then we enter the world of Hipponax’s poetry by discussing his reported feud with the sculptor Boupalos and the other characters, places, and objects that populate it. We sketch a novel approach to the question of its fictionality, while also paying due attention to the other interesting questions posed by the corpus. We conclude by looking at some elements of Hipponax’s poetic language: his play with ‘foreign’ words, his fondness for bizarre compounds, his use of similes, his reception of epic, and his uniquely creative use of metre.