There are indications of a positive trend in education. International comparative investigations on academic achievement and longitudinal studies on life courses prove the need for and the importance of children's high intellectual knowledge. At the same time, new research initiatives and projects comply with the demand that aesthetic/cultural education be "more" than a marginal complement to intellectual education and instead be "fundamental for thinking and acting." Aesthetic education is to provide soft skills, to shape children's characters, and to improve their social competences, representing "the Other of school." The linguist, theorist, and optimist on education of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Joachim Heinrich Campe, edited literary texts, but he also wrote poems and prose for children. In this article, the author will first introduce Gaston Bachelard's theoretical concept of the relational nexus between scientific thinking and reverie he ascribes to poetry. In Bachelard's view, poetry is the articulation of a special kind of experience that is not tangibly comprehensible with traditional scientific methods. According to him, exactly this experience is, and reflects an essential part of the real life. Then, the author will discuss Campe's concept of poetry with close reference to Bachelard. Finally, the author will give examples of twentieth-century poetry that imply different variations of Campe's request of the pedagogue's responsibility and Bachelard's idea of reverie/theory. (Contains 63 notes.)