Along with the song cycles of Franz Schubert (Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise), Schumann's form the core of the genre in musical literature.

Author of the sarcastic Die Romantische Schule, Heine was a vocal critic of German romanticism, though he is often described as a quintessentially Romantic writer.

Dichterliebe was composed before Heine's Deutschland and does not appear to portray this ironic dimension: scholarship is divided as to what extent Schumann intended to express it.

The conclusion of it is that he is going to put the old bad songs and dreams, all his sorrowful love and suffering, into a huge coffin that 12 giants will throw into the sea.

This catastrophe is slightly reminiscent of Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin, in which the hero ends by drowning himself in the brook he has followed through the cycle.

The famed introduction to the first song, Im wunderschönen Monat Mai, is a direct quotation from Clara Wieck-Schumann's Piano Concerto in A minor (1835).