The Schlegel brothers did not originally conceive of poetry in the larger context of a comprehensive aesthetics or an encyclopaedia of the sciences and the arts, but as a topic that directly formed the centre of their interest and spontaneously occupied their investigations. We could also say that their entire thinking about art had a character determined by poetry and that their later aesthetic works and encyclopaedic projects took their starting-point from there. Poetry was the primary subject of reflection for these critics, at least during the early Romantic period. Indeed, the Schlegels were unique in making the investigation of the nature of poetry the vocation of their lives and in seeing the clarification of this question as the particular contribution they wanted to make.

The intention can be seen in Friedrich Schlegel's decision, datable almost in terms of a particular day, to choose the investigation of the ‘art of poetry’ or the ‘poetic work of art’ as the ‘destiny’ of his life (KFSA 23, 96), while A. W. Schlegel had already made this decision during his studies at Göttingen University (1786–91). This highly conscious and persistently pursued objective is easily overlooked in the intellectual panorama of that time because one usually associates the Schlegels with more general trends such as the new stimulus in poetry or the lively development of philosophy and aesthetics. Indeed, they took part in these endeavours by contributing, as A. W. Schlegel did, to Schiller's Horae and the Almanac of the Muses, or in Friedrich Schlegel's case, by immersion in the philosophical life of Jena.