 In his Aesthetische Versuche I (Essays in Aethetics I) of 1799 Humboldt employed an unusual and original approach that enabled him to combine successfully three different tasks, namely a close interpretation of Goethe’s epic poem Hermann und Dorothea, the laying of the foundations of a new aesthetics and poetics proceeding from Kantian transcendental principles and finally the formulation of a theory of literature and literary genres. His starting point is the question: 