JOHANN HEINRICH VOSS (1751–1826) is perhaps best known today for his pioneering work as a translator of Homeric epic and of other classical works including Theocritus's Idylls and Virgil's Eclogues and Georgics. Yet his innovations in the writing of pastoral are significant, particularly for his concentration on aspects of real rural life and his politicization of pastoral as a means of changing rural realities. Clearly, such potential was already implicit in Gottsched's remarks on the poverty and meanness of rural life, which influenced Gessner to project a vision of rural life as it should be, implicitly criticizing present reality. In some of his idylls, Voss dispenses with the highly ambiguous framing techniques used by Gessner, and instead offers a portrayal of the lives of serfs, specifically with the aim of contributing to an end to serfdom.

The extent of Voss's realism has been the subject of scholarly debate, with some critics proposing a sharp divide between the early idylls critical of serfdom and the conciliatory tone of later idylls, particularly Luise. This latter work, which was originally published as three separate idyllic scenes in 1783–84, but much more widely distributed in a revised book of 1795, offers an extended paean to middle-class contentment within the home of the enlightened pastor of fictional Grünau, a world largely sealed off from the politics of the day. Eva D. Becker, for example, argues that the early idyll “Die Pferdeknechte” (The Stable Boys, later retitled “Die Leibeigenen” [The Serfs]) exceeds even the broadest definition of an idyllic “Vollglück in der Beschränkung.” Wilhelm Herbst's literary biography from the 1870s had already set the pattern for this perception of the unresolved disharmonies of Voss's character by contrasting his tendencies towards personal feuds and support for the French Revolution with the peaceful character of pastoral.

Critics have since tried to unpick these tensions by understanding all Voss's pastorals as oppositional. Ernst Theodor Voss argues that Jean Paul's definition is an unhelpful way of understanding the idyll, precisely because it understates its critical potential as a counterimage to an unsatisfactory reality. He argues that Luise represented an ideal state as having been fulfilled, in order to provoke his readers’ desire to bring about that ideal in reality.