Though the strongest reception of Virgil occurs within German idyllic literature, this is ultimately of little consequence. Virgil's reputation and the expectation of finding a Virgilian muse in eighteenth-century literature stands and falls on the epic, the Aeneid. Only once Heinze squarely readdresses the issue of the Virgilian epic, reaching the conclusion that it is not a derivative, plagiarized, non-poem, and restores to it the status of an original and creative work of art, albeit non-Homeric, does a new approach to the Latin poet become possible for the Germans. Only then do the consequences of the estrangement from Virgil in the eighteenth century begin to unravel. At the close of the eighteenth century, such is the distance from Virgil and the absence of any expectation of finding in its literature a Virgilian muse that we may plausibly speak of a repressed muse. At the point of the greatest apparent remove, a sense of possible proximity appears in Novalis's sympathetic reworkings. A more disquieting sense of a romantic proximity also occurs in the unpublished writings of Friedrich Schlegel. It is all the more piquant in him as he is so prominent among the public champions of the new view of the Latin heritage. However, his very disinclination to take further the affinities he observes in his notes illustrates the scale of the hindrances inhibiting any reconsideration of the issue.

Famously in his Gespräch über die Poesie, Schlegel places in the mouth of Ludoviko a speech on mythology.