Hesiod places Hippocrene at the beginning of Greek literary history. In the opening lines of the Theogony the Muses keep holy Helicon and bathe in Permessus, the Horse's Spring or Olmeius before dancing upon the mountain. This is the earliest secure literary connection between Hippocrene and the Muses.

Hesiod's own initiation follows immediately, but not at a named spring. He says the Muses taught him glorious song while he was tending lambs beneath holy Helicon and gave him a laurel staff and divine voice. Because Hippocrene appears only a few lines earlier, later tradition naturally connected the spring with poetic inspiration, but the text does not state that Hesiod stood at Hippocrene when he received his gift.

Pausanias gives the familiar Pegasus explanation. About twenty stades above the grove of the Muses stood Hippocrene, and local people said the water sprang from the ground when the horse of Bellerophon struck it with his hoof. This is a later explanatory tradition attached to an already famous spring rather than something stated in Hesiod's archaic account.

Ovid develops the Pegasus story further. In the Metamorphoses Athena hears that a new spring has been opened by the hoof of Medusa's winged offspring and travels to Helicon to see it. The Muses receive her and explain the wonder, after which they tell the story of the Pierides. The spring therefore becomes both a marvel of Pegasus and a gateway into stories about artistic rivalry.

Callimachus uses Hippocrene for a different divine encounter. Athena and her companion Chariclo bathe there at noon when the young Tiresias arrives while hunting and accidentally sees the goddess unclothed. He loses his sight, and Athena compensates him with prophecy, knowledge of bird signs, a guiding staff and continued understanding among the dead.

Pausanias also records another spring called Hippocrene at Troezen. The Troezenians likewise said that Pegasus made it by striking the ground, and the water was used in the purification of Orestes. The two Hippocrenes share name and origin motif but should not be treated as a single spring with two locations.

By Roman times Hippocrene had become a standard poetic emblem. Propertius imagines drinking from Pegasus's fountain during a dream of poetic ambition, while Persius jokingly denies ever having wet his lips there. Such claims show how far the spring had travelled from Boeotian geography into the vocabulary of literary inspiration.