  From a distance of almost three hundred years, the differences between the “critical poetics” (critische Dichtkunst) of Johann Christoph Gottsched and his critics may seem small, because to us they are all so clearly working within the paradigm established by Wolff. Yet in the 1730s and 1740s their debate was intense, not just because Gottsched was a self-important controversialist who clearly enjoyed being on center stage, but also because their debate about the proper scope and power of the imagination was both theoretically interesting and reflected a tectonic shift in German taste. This shift is away from the French classicism represented by Racine and Corneille to the freer forms of Milton and Shakespeare, which in turn lead to the pan-European romanticism of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.