While the frankfurt edition suggests that Goethe's poems ought to be read in the contexts of carefully crafted ensembles and cycles, it remains common practice to analyze them in distinct isolation. Even in a study as monumental and sophisticated as David Wellbery's The Specular Moment, poems such as “Ganymed” and “Prometheus,” which Goethe regularly placed side by side, are subjected to extensive exegesis without any reflection of their spatial conjunction. Yet Goethe's lyric poetry consists of dynamic poetic processes that surpass the lyric capacity of individual poems. By focusing on the so-called great hymns of the “Geniezeit,” which are commonly regarded as paradigms of the aesthetic autonomy of the individual artwork, this article aims to show how these poems in fact contribute to the realization of a certain poetic idea that transgresses the limits of lyrical expression in single texts. to bring this overall poetic idea to light, Goethe employs the strategy of juxtaposing related poems in the arrangements of certain ensembles, thereby fashioning specific contexts of transmission. I call this strategy “metapoetic” for two reasons: first, because it reveals how the dynamic of the poetic process reaches beyond individual poems; and second, because the hermeneutic reflection of the intertextual relations among the poems of an ensemble generates insight into the “poetologic” of the production process as such.