Though Schiller won fame at first as a dramatist, his early work up to the mid-1780s shows a striking range – poetry, criticism, prose fiction and philosophy – as well as great diversity of subject-matter. The poetry, especially that of the Stuttgart days, is overshadowed by his later work, while his prose fiction and to a certain extent the philosophy of this period arose primarily from his journalistic ventures and so have often been regarded as secondary productions. Yet these early works, for all their limitations, are not only deeply revealing of the poet's complex attitude to the traditions of the Enlightenment and of the conflicts in his own temperament, but they also provide a means of charting his intellectual development, his debt to his education at the Karlsschule and the widening of his vision to begin to encompass the concerns of the 1790s.

Schiller's first published philosophical work was his Philosophische Briefe (Philosophical Letters), an unfinished exchange of letters between the melancholy Julius and his mentor Raphael. Though not published until 1786, the letters gather up material from the Karlsschule period and give the older poet's reflection on the earlier phases of his intellectual development. The legacy of his medical and philosophical training is evident here as it is in a number of works published up to the mid-1780s. If his early dramas probe the question of self-expression, self-assertion and the inner harmony and stability of the individual, these were questions which had been confronting him not only through literature but also through his medical and philosophical studies.