 Gottsched’s work became the subject of a “war of the poets” with the Swiss writers Johann Jacob Bodmer and Johann Jacob Breitinger. Bodmer (1698–1783) taught Swiss history in Zürich for forty years, advocated the works of Dante and Shakespeare, and translated Milton’s Paradise Lost into German prose. Breitinger (1701–76) taught Greek, Hebrew, logic, and rhetoric, and edited the works of the German Baroque poet Martin Opitz. Together, they edited Die Discourse der Mahlern (“The Discourse of the Painters”), Switzerland’s first “moral weekly” based on the model of The Spectator, from 1721–23. These essays did not concern painting at all or even general issues about the arts very much—the name merely reflects their use of the names of famous painters as pseudonymous signatures for their articles—although one of Bodmer’s articles on Opitz celebrated the imagination as the key to poetic success: “A writer such as our Opitz who has enriched and filled the imagination with images of things can write poetry that is lively and natural” and by “the strength of his imagination bring back all the ideas that he had when he was really in love, empathetic, depressed, or enraged” (Die Discourse der Mahlern, Erster Theil, XIX Discourse, cited from Dichtungstheorien der Aufklärung, p. 13).