Why did Goethe and Schiller’s Xenien create a literary controversy?

The Xenien (or "Xenia") were a collection of satirical epigrams jointly composed by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller in the style of the Roman poet Martial.

These poems created a significant literary controversy—often described as a "literary furor"—because they were sharply critical of their contemporaries. By targeting other writers and intellectual figures of the time, the Xenien provoked widespread backlash, which temporarily rendered both Goethe and Schiller very unpopular in the literary community.1