This study of four major poets - Mallarme, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Holderlin - examines the self-reflexivity of modern poetry, exploring questions concerning what it means for a poem to be 'about' its own process of saying. What does it mean to read and understand a text that is focused not on its content but on its saying? What kind of relation does a writer have to the language used in a text? How are we to think about the relation of content to the saying?