The mention of the poet’s penname in the final signature verse of the ghazal frequently entails a shift in grammatical person, known as technically as iltifāt in Arabo-Persian rhetoric. Readers implicitly identify the first-person speaker in the body of the lyric poem with the voice of the poet, but in the signature verse or takhallus, the poet is either addressed by name in the second person or referred to in the third person. This shift can open up a rhetorical space for the poet to speak as a writer and craftsman and to look back and comment on the poem he has just presented. Particularly noteworthy for this kind of metapoetic self-reference are the signature verses of Sā’ib Tabrizi (d. 1676), the acclaimed master of the early modern Persian ghazal. In some cases, Sā’ib uses the takhallus to acknowledge his debt to other poets by identifying the author of the poem that served as his model and quoting a half-verse from it. But in other instances, he utilizes the signature verse to celebrate the originality of his work: “Whoever knows the delight of exotic tropes and images, / Sā’ib, will know of our fresh style.” Is this use of the takhallus peculiar to Sā’eb or does it typify a literary self-consciousness characteristic of Persian poetry of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries more generally? This paper will compare Sā’ib’s practice with the works of two other prominent poets of this period—his contemporary Kalīm Kāshānī (d. 1651) and his great successor ‘Abd al-Qādir Bīdil (d. 1720)—to determine how widespread such metapoetic gestures in the signature verse are and to evaluate any differences in poetics or attitudes to poetry they may indicate.