The strategy of experimentation pursued by Luigi Groto (1541–1585) in his ‘Rime’ stretches the preceding lyrical tradition and its form language to the very limit of their capacity. The author figure responsible for this formal hyperbole is staged in a conspicuous, plurimedial fashion in the proeminal passages of the 1610 complete edition, lending a clearly metapoetical dimension to the lyric texts. Within the collection as a whole, the radical treatment of Petrarchan and epigrammatic strategies of textualization serves to prominently foreground the maniera of the author, which is characterized by a ‘tormented’ diction of suffering. The autoreflective turn of the text thus corresponds to the self-staging and self-mirroring of the empirical author in his textual figura. Here, ‘auto-reflexivity’ coincides with ‘author-reflexivity’. This connection is established via a suggestive emphasis on the (real) blindness of the empirical author, which interacts with the topical blindness of Amor and the metaphorical blindness of the figura amantis. The composite figure of the blind autore-amante attains a high degree of singularity, threatening to emancipate itself from the confines of Petrarchan standardization and poetical schematization. Moreover, the programmatic analogy between the blind lyricist Groto and the blind epicist Homer invests lyric poetry with increased status as a literary genre.