The emphasis on the imagination seems to have been the central issue in Bodmer and Breitinger’s dispute with Gottsched, which came to a head in Breitinger’s own Critische Dichtkunst, published in 1740 with a forward by Bodmer. Because they shared with Gottsched the general assumption that art is based on the imitation of nature and has the goal of making important moral truths come alive for us, it is hard to see exactly what divided the two sides in this dispute, but the key seems to lie in th