The imaginative vision with which Kleist closes Prinz Friedrich von Homburg represents, in many ways, an appropriately masterful expression of his aesthetic and political concerns and principles. The resistance to absolute closure, the sense of tension between subject and world, and the confrontation between tradition and modernity—these are all very much signature attributes of his poetics. So too is the blend of visionary idealism and realism that owes, artistically, to Shakespeare in its quality and complexity, and that not only bears on this piece, but also presents as a major feature of Kleist's life and work—in the merging of his fascination with the imaginary and his desire for a close proximity to human experience, and in the contest between his striving for perfection and order and his acute awareness of the contradictions inherent in the modern world.

This dialectic of idealism and realism provides an important framework for negotiating Kleist's relationship to Rousseau. The perspective is not, in itself, especially novel—its antecedents can be found in much of the older critical literature on Kleist where his reading of Rousseau is traced as a direct response to the metaphysical crisis of 1801; his loss of faith in the secure rationality of Enlightenment virtues is seen to prompt a turn toward an “interior sentiment” (“sentiment intérieur”) as moral and cognitive instance.