  The practical aim of the Critical Poetics was to elevate the tone of German popular theater and moderate the Baroque excesses of the upper-class theater by recommending the model of the classical French theater of Racine and Corneille. The theoretical basis of the work was the Wolffian principle that the theater and other forms of poetry (Gottsched had little to say about the emerging medium of the novel) should be used to convey important moral truths through images that would make them accessible and engaging for a wide audience. Gottsched stated his position a year before the Critical Poetics in a speech with the anti-Platonic title “Plays and especially tragedies are not to be banished from a well-ordered republic” where he defined a tragedy as