Much admired and much criticized, Schiller's poems have survived: the competition with Goethe, the mockery of the Romantics, and even their popularity. What makes Schiller's poems fascinating and unique in their own way is the intellectual individuality of their author, which was as unsettling during his lifetime as it is today: the ultimate explanation for everything could perhaps be called the sole dominion of the spirit, the inner strength that preserves him free from both the external influences of the age and the internal ones of sensuality, of mere receptivity. Wilhelm von Humboldt.