From a literary point of view, modernism is primarily a linguistic project. And lyric poetry is seen as the paradigm of modernism. Poetic texts unleash the bonds of tradition. Friedrich Nietzsche proclaims "Language as art", and modernist poets around 1900 such as Arno Holz, George, Rilke, Morgenstern follow this summons, each in their own way. The present study demonstrates this process, by comparative studies of the poets' concepts of language and by literary and linguistic interpretations, principally of poems reflecting on language. Thus both the individual and collective pathways to modernism are revealed.