In the decades following emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, imperial backing for this religion coincided with intensified religious competition and search for orthodoxy across the Roman Empire. I suggest that, in this context of renewed religious, but also literary, competition, a new self-awareness emerged in Syriac poetry, which ultimately reshaped Syriac poetics and led to the birth of Syriac literary criticism. This crucial and far-reaching transformation is instantiated in the work of Ephrem the Syrian (d. 373 CE), who made a case for the fundamental coherence of his poetry with Scripture.