Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (On Naive and Sentimental Poetry) marks a crossroads in literary criticism. It has been called a ‘programme for Classicism’ and yet at the same time it contains a strikingly original theory of modern literature. It begins in the realm of familiar eighteenth-century debates but advances from them to a discussion of literature which pinpoints what is perhaps the central creative problem for any modern writer – how to overcome the separation of creative mind and external world brought about by man's self-consciousness. The poet's divided consciousness is for Schiller what makes modern poetry modern. He writes in a time of cultural as well as political crisis, and though his solutions to the artistic problems he describes have not always found acceptance, his approach to the analysis of literary phenomena not only profoundly affected the German Romantics who followed him, but numerous later writers and critics, who have returned to the essay's now classic formulations.

Written at a great watershed in European history, it shares with numerous later works of the Romantic period the insistent use of images which, though by no means new, came to sum up the efforts of European writers and thinkers to come to terms with the immense cultural and political upheaval they were witnessing. These are images of rupture, disharmony, unity dissolving into fragmentation, of journeys and destinations, all of them familiar topoi but employed in an attempt to analyse civilization's crisis and to articulate a tentative hope of progress through reintegration.