Peter Szondi began his course Ancients and Moderns in the Poetics of the Age of Goethe by considering the meaning of the word “poetics.” Poetics bears a double meaning as the doctrine of both Dichtung (poetry) and Dichtkunst (ars poetica). On the one hand Dichtung is taken as a philosophical problem, as the theory that concerns what poetry is. On the other hand Dichtkunst is taken as a technical issue, as the theory of the poetic technique regarding the issue of how to make poetry. Nonetheless, both are interwoven—the reflection on poetry making must lead back to its technique:

The question “how to make poetry” turns into a normative system, into poetics that prescribe rules. The many “poetic arts” have become greatly relevant, a fact that can be seen in France with Boileau, for instance. In Germany this type of poetics that deals exclusively with the composition of poems weakens from 1770 onward. At the end of the eighteenth century a new species of poetics emerges, the philosophical poetics, “which does not seek for rules that apply in praxis, nor for differences that would be taken into account in writing, but for a knowledge that suffices by itself.