The study provides a deciphering reading of the language-reflexive and poetological poems of the Austrian poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, whose texts are interpreted as encrypted signatures of the epoch. The linguistic artistry of the lyric work is opened up and made legible as a document of linguistic history. The linguistic analysis starts from the conviction that the selected poems by Hofmannsthal arise from an individual experience of language which gains its aesthetic presence in the lyrical text. By approaching an outstanding protagonist of modernism, the account adds an important chapter in German-Austrian language history. The poems as an expression of a literary linguistic awareness are placed in a context with reflexive statements on language, critical linguistic notes and documents of engagement with language culture. This (linguo-)political, social and cultural contextualisation provides the prerequisite for sketching Hofmannsthal’s literary language work - here in his lyric poetry - as a paradigm of classical modernism.