D.G. Myers - The Rise of Creative Writing

The Rise of Creative Writing
Author(s): D. G. Myers
Source: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 54, No. 2 (Apr., 1993), pp. 277-297
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2709983
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The Rise of Creative Writing
D. G. Myers
Whetherpoets are born or made is amysterythatremains unsolved, buthow

it came about that professional schools for poets (or what are more commonly
known as creative writing workshops) were mapped out and instituted is a story
that can be told with a little greater certainty.'
It is a story that has never been told in satisfying detail, and except by those
who wished to press history into the service of apologia, it has rarely been told
at all.2 And yet it is a subject of some importance. Writers' workshops now exist
in large and increasing numbers, forming something ofanational system forthe
training of creative writers. At last count there were more than three hundred of
them, granting as many as a thousand degrees annually.3 "Together they've
probably turned out 75,000 official 'writers,' " John Barth calculates.4 As might
be expected, all manner of questions have been raised about such an extensive
and industrious system, from its social functionto its effects upon contemporary
literature.' One means by which its spokesmen have sought to defend it is by
' For criticism and advice I am grateful to Gerald Graff, Joseph Epstein, Paul M. Hedeen,
M. Jimmie Killingsworth, and the members of the Interdisciplinary Group for Historical
Literary Study at Texas A&M University. I also wish to thank Stanford University for
permission to quote from the Norman Foerster papers held by the Cecil H. Green Library.
2 And then only in passing. James A. Berlin, for example, tells of a 1931 report on creative
writing in the English Journal and summarizes without comment its author's view of the
subject's evolution: "Schools first offered courses focusing on rhetorical principles, then
combined rhetoric and composition, then offered composition alone, and, at last, developed
distinctive creative writing courses" (Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American
Colleges, 1900-1985 [Carbondale, 1987], 80). Similarly, without giving any specifics David R.
Russell says that early in the century "English departments began to offer specialized advanced
courses in what is today called 'creative writing' ... though creative writing did not become
entrenched in academia until the new generation of 'new critics' arrived in the 1940s" (Writing
in the Academic Disciplines, 1870-1990: A Curricular History [Carbondale, 1991], 180).
3 During the academic year 1988-89, there were 1,107 degrees awarded in creative
writing-592 bachelors, 511 masters, and 4 doctorates. See the Digest of Education Statistics,
1991 (Washington, 1991), table 233, p. 243. For the number of programs, see D. W. Fenza and
Beth Jarock, eds., A. W. P. Official Guide to WritingPrograms, sixth ed. (Paradise, Col., 1992).
4 New York Times, January 8, 1984.
5 See, for example, Donald Hall, "Poetry and Ambition," Kenyon Review, n.s., 5 (1983),
90-104; Bruce Bawer, "Dave Smith's 'Creative Writing,' "New Criterion, 4 (Dec. 1985), 27-
277
Copyright 1993 by Journal of the History of Ideas, Inc.
278 D. G. Myers
citing ancient pre

often than not th
poet Dave Smith, for instance, claims that
its pedigree is overlooked frequently but nevertheless exists from the

pre-Socratic philosophers to the Scribler Club [sic] of Swift, Pope, Gay,
etc., to Ransom, Warren, Tate, and other Fugitives, to the Harlem
Renaissance, to the Beats, to Black Mountain, and unto university
programs in creative writing.6
This is a ludicrous hodgepodge, but the historical error implicit within it is

repeated, in more respectable form, in Stephen Wilbers's quasi-official history
The Iowa Writers' Workshop (1980). Wilbers argues that "the milieu from
whichthe Workshop emerged was the tradition ofthe [amateur] writers' clubs,"
the local reading-and-writing circles with names like Zetagathian, Erodelphian,
and Hesperian, which flourished in Iowa City from the early 1 890s to the second
decade ofthe twentieth century.7 The so-called "workshop method" of gather-
ing to read aloud and exchange views on work by members of the group is,
Wilbers argues, a lineal descendant of the manner in which the writers' clubs
conducted their meetings. This may or may not be true; but even if it is true, the
institution ofthe graduate writers' workshop, at Iowa or elsewhere, owes little
else to the "tradition" of the writers' clubs. The search for origins suggests
more ofayearning forroots than a genuine inquiry into history. Creative writing
was not organized as an academic enterprise by a group of writers who wanted
to meet and discuss their writing, nor does it owe its existence to rude fumbling
after an institutional apparatus. Writing workshops may looklike literary clubs
or cliques, butthe academic discipline is not definedby its mode of association;
it is defined by its idea ofeducation. Creative writing was devised as an explicit
solution to explicit problems. It has a clear beginning which can be clearly dated.
In this essay I propose to show that creative writing arose during a sixty-year
period from about 1880 to 1940 as an effort to reform the study of literature. As
originally envisioned, creative writing was not a scheme forturning out official
33; Greg Kuzma, "The Catastrophe of Creative Writing," Poetry, 148 (1986), 342-54; Bruce
Bawer, "Another Victim of Creative Writing," American Spectator, 20 (Dec. 1987), 69-71;
Joseph Epstein, "Who Killed Poetry?" Commentary, 86 (August 1988), 13-20; David Dooley,
"The Contemporary Workshop Aesthetic," Hudson Review, 43 (1990), 259-80; John W.
Aldridge, "The New American Fiction," American Scholar, 59 (1990), 17-38; Dana Gioia,
"Can Poetry Matter?" Atlantic Monthly, 267 (1991), 94-106; and D. G. Myers, "Creativity,
Inc.," Commentary, 93 (January 1992), 59-61; R. S. Gwynn, "No Biz Like Po' Biz," Sewanee
Review, 100 (1992), 311-23; and George Garrett, "Creative Writing and American Publishing
Now," Sewanee Review, 100 (1992), 569-75.
6 Dave Smith, "Notes on the Responsibility and the Teaching of Creative Writing," in
Local Assays: On Contemporary American Poetry (Urbana, 1985), 221.
7 Stephen Wilbers, The Iowa Writers' Workshop: Origins, Emergence, and Growth (Iowa
City, 1980), 19-20.
The Rise of Creative Writing 279
writers, but an institutional arrangem

continuous experience rather than a mere corpus of knowledge-as if it were a
living thing, as if people intended to write more of it. The character of this
educational reform varies from plan to plan, but it is not merely various. Among
the different plans there is a principle of identity. In each of them literature is
conceived (in Michael Oakeshott's phrase) as both an achievement and a
promise, an inheritance of texts and an inclusive, variable set of methods and
standards for generating new texts. Wherever it appears, an education in writing
arises as a challenge to any other conception of literature. Creative writing is the
name that might be given to any effort that undertakes to restore the idea of
literature as an integrated discipline ofthought and activity, oftextual study and
practical technique. The plan for integrating the discipline is not always
adequate to the task. Occasionally, too, the nature of the integration has been
imperfectly understood, and its exponents have nodded long enough to disre-
gard the study oftexts-especially non-contemporary texts-in favor of sheer
practice. But even then the coherent view of literature which stands behind the
original conception of creative writing has not been lost; it has been only
temporarily forgotten. As a discipline of education, creative writing has
remained fairly consistent. It is the integration of literary study with literary
practice, and it is a new bearing in education because the disintegration ofthese
is new.
Such an argument flies in the face of settled opinion. It is widely assumed
that instruction in creative writing, in one form or another, is something that
cultures have always provided their young writers-although obviously under
different names. Richard Hugo, for example, insists that
It's not new. For around 400 years it was a requirement of every
student's education. Inthe English-speaking world, the curriculum for
grammar and high school students included the writing of "verses." In
the nineteenth century, when literary education weakened or was
dropped from elementary and secondary education, colleges picked it
up, all but the creative writing. Creative writing was missing for 100
years or so, but in the past 40 years it has returned.8
But creative writing is new. It is true that, in the English-speaking world as

elsewhere, the study of poetry was once a requirement of every student's
education. While it is also true thatthe study ofpoetry once included the writing
ofverses, the factremainsthatthis study was founded onthe humanistic premise
that poetry was one part of a broader initiation in human self-understanding. It
was not a narrower initiation in the discipline of literary art. The aim of a
humanistic education was to produce not poets but human beings. It was not
8 Richard Hugo, "In Defense of Creative-Writing Classes," in The Triggering Town:

Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing (New York, 1979), 53.
280 D. G. Myers
adverse to producing poets, but in the humanistic order ofthings one became a
poet in order to become a more complete person, not the other way around.
"Make me a poet," Drayton remembers beseeching his schoolmaster. "Doe it;
if you can,! And you shall see, Ile quickly be a man...."9 And as Jonson says in
drawing up the character ofthe ideal poet, "that, which we especially require in
him is an exactness of study, and multiplicity of reading, which maketh a full
man.... *"10 The writing ofverses was one means to achieve exactness in literary
study. It was a method of enforcing precept by practical illustration. It was not
a separate instruction in creative writing.
What weakened and was dropped from schooling in the nineteenth century
was not a vaguely conceived literary education but the humanistic ideal of a
multiplicity of reading, which included the ability to compose verses. What
replaced it was a different ideal altogether-the ideal of systematic, rigorous,
scientific knowledge. It is a commonplace in recent scholarship to observe that
the scientific impulse-the stir in many academic fields during the nineteenth
century to demarcate an area of study and regularize a mode of inquiry-may
best be explained as the impulse of a newly emergent scientific elite to define
its field in terms of what it was itself capable of doing."1 At all events the study
of literature was no exception in this regard. As is now well-known, advanced
literary study in the later nineteenth century in America was dominated by
German-trainedphilologists like Francis J. Child ofHarvard andAlbert S. Cook
of Johns Hopkins, who conceived of literature as a convenient galaxy of
linguistic phenomena, not as a human performance. Their method (as described
by an antagonist) was "to scrutinize every syllable [of a text] with a care
undisturbed by consideration ofany more ofthe context than was grammatically
related to it."'12 And the philologists preferred the study of Anglo-Saxon to
9 Michael Drayton, "To My Most Dearley-Loved Friend Henery Reynolds Esquire," in

Works, ed. J. William Hebell (Oxford, 1932), III, 226. The poem was originally published in
Elegies Upon Sundry Occasions (1627).
10 Ben Jonson, Timber: or Discoveries, in Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (New H
1975), 448. First published in 1640.
l See, for example, Michael Warner, "Professionalization and the Rewards of Litera-
ture," Criticism, 27 (1985), 1-28; Brian McCrea, Addison and Steele Are Dead: The English
Department, Its Canon, and the Professionalization ofLiterary Criticism (Newark, Del., 1990);
Alvin Keman, The Death of Literature (New Haven, 1990); and Bruce Robbins, "Oppositional
Professionals: Theory and the Narratives of Professionalization," in Consequences of Theory:
Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1987-88, ed. Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson
(Baltimore, 1991), 1-21. The primary source for much of the argument about professionalization
in literary study is Magali Sarfatti Larson's Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis
(Berkeley, 1977). According to Andrew Abbott, a tendency in recent sociology toward the
"unmasking" of the ideological claims of professions reached its "final form" in Larson's
book. For a critique of this tendency, see Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the
Division of Expert Labor (Chicago, 1988), 16ff.
12 Barrett Wendell, Stelligeri and Other Essays Concerning America (New York, 1893),
206.
anything closer to present concerns, at least according to one of their former

students,
apparently on the ground that the earlier the English the purer and the
better worth knowing it is, and the more barren the literature the less
probability that a student will be diverted by some literary ignisfatuus
from the study of the forms of words.'3
Philology almost completely drove outthe humanistic ideal, forwhatphilology

soughtwas precision, uniformity, system. The humanistic teaching ofliterature
was short on all of these. The humanistic spirit in literary education is perhaps
best caught in a student's description of the teaching of La Divina Commedia
by one ofthe last greathumanists. James Russell Lowell, saidthe student, never
"let you forget that you were a human being in a human world, and that Dante
had been, too"; for Lowell "found in literature not something gravely myste-
rious, but only the best record that human beings have made of human life."'4
Such knowledge could never be perfected or reduced to uniformity and system,
and so it was coldly dismissed by the philologist, who was (said another
antagonist) "pitiless in his stern resolution to approve himself a scientific
critic."15 For the most part, then, where literature was taught in the later
nineteenth century, itwas the philological mood (ifnotthe philological method)
thatprevailed. In 1888 one Englishteacherrecalled how she had been instructed
in English literature a decade before:
A small biographical history of literature served for a textbook and an

interrogation mark for a teacher. The lesson was so many hard dry
facts-dates, names, and titles-all to be piled up in the memory like
bricks. Even the day of the month of the author's birth and death, no
matter how unimportant his work might be, must be carefully memo-
rized. The titles of all the works each writer had composed, with the
dates of publication, must be religiously committed to memory. Great
emphasis was laidupon such good mouth-filling names asAreopagitica,
Novum Organum, or the Leviathan. That these words might mean
anything or contain ideas which we could understand never once
dawned on us. Why one man was called a better writer than another we
made no attemptto find out. We memorizedthe opinion ofourtextbook
with painstaking accuracy, and that always satisfied the question
mark.'6
13 Adams Sherman Hill, Our English (New York, 1889), 75.

14 Wendell, Stelligeri, 208, 211.
15 Brander Matthews, Gateways to Literature and Other Essays (New York, 1912), 64.
16 Laura Sanderson Hines, "The Study of English Literature," Education, 9 (1888), 229.
Italics added.
282 D. G. Myers
In short, English literature was conceived as a body ofknowledge-orperhaps

of information-but not as a ground and context for judgment. By the early
1 890s, complained a nostalgic professor at New York University, the literary
spirit had departed the collegiate life: it had been replaced by the methods of "the
philological dissector"; and "discipline," he lamented, had "taken the place of
inspiration. 17
Literature was conceived as a source of knowledge about language or as
backgrounds to reading. Nowhere in nineteenth-century America, apparently,
was it studied in such a manner, as urged by one advocate, that "the mind [of
the student] must reproduce in some measure the processes and fundamental
mood ofthe creative mind."18 Nowhere, that is, was it studied as a discipline in
itselfwhich could enable its students, if they possessed the necessary talent, to
do something in literature. Even where it assumed a place in the curriculum,
then, the university study of literature included neitherthe practice ofwriting nor
any account of how literary texts are created. The "creative" or "constructive"
aspects of literature, as they came to be known, were the province of rhetoric;
but rhetoric was not literature. As a high-school teacher observed, looking back
on her college days, literature and rhetoric
were taught as distinct branches. One was an account of the lives of

literary men; the other was a summary of conclusions as to good usage
of language, based on their writings. Neither was, properly speaking, a
study of literature. From a literary standpoint, neither was of much
value, and the latter was almost devoid of educational value. 19
By the last quarter of the nineteenth century literary study and literary
practice were no longer united with each other. Behind the breakup was a corrupt
viewofliterature. Underthe influence ofphilology, the conception ofliterature
as aknowledge thatwas divorced from any conception ofit as aknowledge how
(to borrow Gilbert Ryle ' s distinction). Literature was approached as an order of
hard dry facts (or, by later teachers, who shared the philological assumption
often without being aware of it, literature was approached as a banquet of rich
meanings) abstracted from any recognition or mastery of the skills by which
meanings are formulated and facts given value. By the last quarter of the
nineteenth century philology had overturned the humanistic ideal of literature
as a means to self-understanding and development, which had included the
acquisition of literary skills. And if literature was no longerthe bestthat had been
thought and said in the world, it could hardly be approached as what mightyet
be thought and said.
17 Francis H. Stoddard, "Literary Spirit in the Colleges," Educational Review, 6 (1893),

126.
18 Frederic Ives Carpenter, "The Study of Literature," Poet-Lore, 6 (1894), 379.
19 L. May McLean, "Rhetoric in Secondary Schools," Education, 18 (1897), 158.
This was the milieu from which cre

of practice from study that creative
subject was not called creative writing initially; it was called English composi-
tion.20 What now passes for composition in American higher education is a
heterogeneous, even amorphous field, but its subsequent career should not be
permitted to obscure its initial singleness of purpose. English composition was
the first widely successful attempt to offer instruction in writing in English not
merely as an insignificant and subordinate part ofthe humanistic curriculum but
(in the words of its chief founder) as a "thing apart." It was formulated at
Harvard in the last two decades of the nineteenth century out of the belief that
the ideal end ofthe study of literature is the making of literature. As such it was,
an observer noted a few years later, "only the first of a long line of demands for
literary fluency."21 Indeed, the subsequent heterogeneity of composition can
largely be explained as the result of successful attacks on it for being too
literary-something less elitist (as we would now say) was called for. By that
time, however, the demand for literary fluency was already beginning to be
satisfied by creative writing.
English composition at Harvard in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries has been recognized before now as a precedent for creative writing. It
has long been known that the Harvard staff-Adams Sherman Hill, Barrett
Wendell, Le Baron R. Briggs, Charles Townsend Copeland-would occasion-
allyacceptpoems andstories forcreditintheirclasses.22 Here, itis said, wasthe
first time that fiction was ever written for academic credit in the American
university. The claim is valid-so far as it goes. However, the facts have been
misinterpreted if what is being inferred from them is that creative writing's
founders acted upon the hint ofearlier teachers and elaborated it into a full-blown
system. The literary form of the writing that is done in creative writing classes
is notwhat gives the discipline its distinctiveness. The name of creative writing
came to be extended as a term for fiction in general because the academic
20 Berlin opens Rhetoric and Reality by dividing "rhetoric, the production of written and
spoken texts" from "poetic, the interpretation of texts" (1). This is a common view-namely,
that the current division of labor in English departments into composition (production) and
literary study (interpretation) has some basis in history. For examples of how the distinction is
put into play in recent scholarship, see Evan Watkins, Work Time: English Departments and the
Circulation of Cultural Value (Stanford, 1989); Susan Miller, Textual Carnivals: The Politics
of Composition (Carbondale, 111., 1991); and Christy Friend, "The Excluded Conflict: The
Marginalization of Composition and Rhetoric Studies in Graff's Professing Literature,"
College English, 54 (1992), 276-86. Whatever the merits of this neat-looking dichotomy, my
own argument is that composition was originally distinguished from both rhetoric and
interpretation; historically, the "creative" study of writing has represented a third way.
21 C. H. Ward, "Fluency First," Education, 38 (1917), 103.
22 See, for example, Wallace Stegner, On the Teaching of Creative Writing (Hanover, N.H.,
1988), 45-46. The debt to Harvard may have been given currency by John Reed's effusive
dedication of his 1914 book Insurgent Mexico to Charles Townsend Copeland, which can be
read as an acknowledgment that Copeland taught him how to write.
284 D. G. Myers
discipline of writi
thus from the non
the key is that it
composition cleare
stories but in estab
other purpose than philological research.
The central figure in the early formation of the discipline was Barrett
Wendell (1855-1921). Himself a "creative writer"-he used the phrase as
early as 1886 to distinguish one type of writer from another-Wendell joined
the Harvard staff in 1880 as assistant to Adams Sherman Hill, the Boylston
Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. One of the first novelists to teach at an
American university, Wendell continued to hope for a self-supporting career i
literature; but after the failure of his novels The Duchess Emilia (1885) and
Rankell 's Remains (1887), he turned his full attention to teaching. He did not
merely teach, however; he completely revamped the teaching of writing at
Harvard, publicized ceaselessly on its behalf, and created a cadre of disciples
such as George Rice Carpenter and the novelist Robert Herrick, who spread his
ideas and methods to universities such as Columbia and Chicago. Although he
was not the first to use the title, his 1891 bookEnglish Composition, which went
through thirty editions, was perhaps the most popular composition text of all
time, bringing the new subject to the attention of a wider public.24 His efforts,
culminating in the 1892 Harvard Report on the teaching of writing, "made a
burning 'question of the day,' " said the Dial, "out of a matter previously little
more than academic in its interest."25
Wendell's own experience ofwriting for publication had convinced him that
good writing was "agreeable, as distinguished from correct," and that real
writers feltthemselves to be "living in areal world as distinguished from aworld
23 Emerson appears to have coined the phrase. In "The American Scholar" (1837), creative
writing is distinguished from scholarly writing. Barbara L. Packer insists that "what Emerson
is really concemed with has nothing to do with scholarship" (Emerson's Fall: A New
Interpretation of the Major Essays [New York, 1982], 114). But in fact Emerson's case
creative learning-for the figure of Man Thinking-positively demands an attack upon
academic scholarship; that is its essential precondition. In scholarship, Emerson complains,
"[t]he sacredness which attaches to the act of creation, the act of thought, is transferred to the
record" (Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Richard Poirier [Oxford, 1990], 40).
24 The first textbook to use "English composition" in its title was evidently that of David
Irving, published in Philadelphia in 1803 and reprinted in 1825. The phrase then reappeared in
titles of books by Richard Green Parker (1835 and 1846), one Dr. Brewer (in London, 1859),
James R. Boyd (1860), I. H. Nutting (1860), Walter Scott Dalgliesh (in Edinburgh, 1868),
William Swinton (1870), and Alexander Bain (1871). See Dolly Svobodny (ed.), Early
American Textbooks, 1775-1900 (Washington, 1985), 28. Prior to the appearance of Wendell's
book, the phrase merely denoted the practical English equivalent of Latin composition; after
Wendell's book, the phrase referred to a specific discipline of study, characterized by a specific
constellation of ideas.
25 William Morton Payne (ed.), English in American Universities (Boston, 1895), 12. The
book consists of a series of articles originally published in the Dial during 1894.
ofbooks."26 So the teaching ofwritin

from rhetoric and on the other from
in mind, Wendell set out to conduct
which was to enable "everyday students" to write with "habitual and
unpretentious skill," while "exceptional pupils" would "become skillful
creative artists-poets, ifthey truly be poets, ofrefreshingly confidenttechn
power."27
This talk ofrefreshing the technical power ofpoets was one regard in w
the teaching of writing was a conscious reform of literary study. Although
training ofpoets was nothis first concern, in Wendell's viewthe only education
available to them was of little use to them as poets. Nor was he alone in this
conviction that the problem ofpoetic technique was misleadingly scanted in the
university study of literature.28 The experiment was also conceived as a counter-
irritantto the scholarship ofthe day. Something was needed atHarvard, Wendell
later said, "to help men who are willing to be helped" toward "larger
thinking"-a need that "Germanized scholarship" had checked.29 Wendell
was contemptuous ofthe "plodding scholar, burrowing in detail until he cares
mostly for technical exactitude."30
The contrast oftechnical power to technical exactitude suggests much about
how Wendell envisioned the teaching of writing, but he seems also to have
meant what others had taken to abusing as formalism in education: namely, the
expectationthat the end ofstudy was the mastery ofknowledge that didnot look
to the production of anything.' For Wendell the whole point of education was
that it should inspire the desire to work: "The test of living study is that it shall
stimulate curiosity, aspiration, awilling, almost spontaneous effort."32 The real
26 Barrett Wendell, "English Work in Secondary Schools," School Review, 1 (1893), 659.
27 Barrett Wendell, The Privileged Classes (New York, 1908), 237.
28 In the early 1890s, a few years after Wendell began teaching composition at Harvard, the
critic Brander Matthews developed a course in "metrical composition" at Columbia. One of
his purposes in offering the course was to repair the neglect of technique in literary studies. In
a textbook for the course, Matthews said his objective was to lead students "to a richer
appreciation of poetry" by concentrating their attention on poetic technique. Although the
problem of technique may seem trivial and unimportant, the true writer "cherishes" it, "is
forever thinking about it and enlarging his knowledge of it," and knows that it is "almost the
only aspect of art which can be discussed profitably" (A Study of Versification [Boston, 191 1,
vi, 2).
29 Barrett Wendell, letter to Frederic Schenck (June 1915), in M. A. DeWolfe Howe,
Barrett Wendell and His Letters (Boston, 1924), 269.
30 Barrett Wendell, The Mystery of Education and Other Academic Performances (New
York, 1909), 117.
31 The phrase is that of Professor David B. Frankenburger of the University of Wisconsin
(see Payne, English, 135). The classic study ofthe revolt against formalism in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries remains Morton G. White's Social Thought in America (Boston,
1949). For a more recent account which pursues an ideological critique of much of the same
material, see Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge, 1991).
32 Wendell, Mystery, 27.
286 D. G. Myers
purpose of the stud

work."33 Even a blue book could be a work of literature: "In its own lesser way
a letter, an examination book, a college thesis-or whatever else yourpoetaster
would most disdain-may surely be a work of art, and as a work of art a thing
of beauty."34 Every teacher of English, Wendell said, ought to teach the forms
ofwriting, eventhe most instrumental and mundane, as ifthey were "fragment[s]
of literature." For "if all went well here below," he concluded, "the ideal end
of the study of literature would be not only the enjoyment of poetry, but the
making of it."35
Wendell's method ofteaching was to require from students a daily theme,
andthis daily theme very quickly became the core methodology, the identifying
mark, ofthe new discipline. Within a few years of Wendell's first teaching it in
1884, courses in the daily theme were seemingly everywhere. The aim of the
course, according to the poet Katherine Lee Bates, who taught the daily theme
at Wellesley, was "to quicken observation and give as much practice as possible
in the sifting and grouping facts of personal experience."36 Wendell said the
only "requisites" of a daily theme were that "the subject shall be a matter of
observation during the day when it is written, that the expression of it shall not
exceed a hundred words or so, and that the style be fluent and agreeable."37
Critics satirized it as "jotting down daily what the student saw on his walk to
the post-office."38
However, the daily theme was particularly well cut to the literary theory
behind the new writing course. As Wendell said in English Composition, the
object was to teach a young writer to recognize and grasp the individual nature
of experience. "It is the perception of what makes one moment different from
another than marks the sympathetic character of the artist," he said; "and
nothing can do more to make life interesting than the deliberate cultivation of
such perception."39 The object, in other words, was to produce something not
unlike literature-but by literature was meant descriptive writing full of sensory
detail, which did not preclude the writing of poems and stories. Yet the
innovation of accepting poems and stories was institutionalized by the doctrine
of the deliberate cultivation of personal experience; and it was the substance
(personal experience), not the form (poems and stories), that was of first
importance. For itwas personal experience andnotthe formal qualities ofpoems
and stories that was the object of study. Poems and stories were merely ready
vehicles.

3 Wendell, Privileged Classes, 94.
35 Wendell, Privileged Classes, 223.
36 Payne, English, 145-46.
37 Wendell, "English Work," 659-60.
38 W. E. Mead, "The Graduate Study of Rhetoric," PMLA, 16 (1901), xxvi.
I' Barrett Wendell, English Composition: Eight Lectures Given at the Lowell Institute
(New York, 1891), 265.
The renovations in the teaching of writing put into effect at Harvard

reverberatedthroughoutthe country. "As the Frankishtribes inthe sixth century
submitted to Rome," John Jay Chapman said, "so the Americans in the
nineteenth submitted to Massachusetts."40 By the end ofthe century Wende
conception of writing instruction had become the dominant mode. Such
dominance did not last long: by the 1 920s, it was reported, the daily theme had
been dropped from the writing course in perhaps a majority ofU.S. colleges.41
Yet its influence was lingering, because despite its shortcomings as a course in
English proficiency and good usage, it installed an alternative conception of
literature at the heart of the university curriculum; and this did not fade away.
"[It] is not that our courageous experiments in the teaching and study of
composition as athing aparthave been fruitless," Wendell said; "it is rathertha
they have led to unforeseen conclusions."42 One ofthe unforeseen conclusions
would be creative writing, but there was some way yet to go before it came into
full view.
Still, something of what would come to characterize creative writing ma
be gathered from this account ofthe earlier English composition. As undertake
by Wendell andhis colleagues and followers, instruction inwriting was a "thin
apart" from the study of texts, where the study of texts was understood as th
exhaustive analysis ofthe language that makes up a text. In other words it w
opposedto the reigning orthodoxy in literary scholarship. By settingthemselve
apart, the adepts of composition endeavored to reform literary study by
establishing an alternative institutionalpractice for the study of literature. The
exact nature of this practice was regular (daily) writing in which fluency and
agreeableness of style (or "technical power") was emphasized over correctness
as a means of giving order to personal experience. As such the practice was
founded upon the conviction that literature is not merely a body of knowledge
but also aproductive activity. From the start, then, the discipline of writing has
treated literature (inAllen Tate's laterphrase) as ifpeople intendedto write more
of it.
Creative writing did not appear under its own name until about the time that
Wendell's species of English composition was in eclipse. Wendell had never
beenwithouthis critics, andthe antagonismto his ideas was often giventhe form
ofa call for a different kind ofwriting instruction altogether. But more often than
not the new plan either traded on English composition's name or depended upon
the assumption, achieved largely through the efforts of Wendell, that the
teaching and study of writing rightfully belonged in the university. In the first
two decades ofthe twentieth century, as composition more and more seemed a
natural and inevitable part of the curriculum, critics accepted its institutional
40 John Jay Chapman, "President Eliot," in Selected Works, ed. Jacques Barzun (New
York, 1957), 218. The essay was originally published in 1915.
41 Bernard DeVoto, "English A," American Mercury, 13 (1928), 207.
288 D. G. myers
status as a given and sought a merely conservative reform carried out from
within. Broadly speaking, there were two principal objections: compositionwas
either said to be too literary, too remote from the actual needs of real students
and their general academic development; or it was said to be not creative enough,
not sufficiently concerned with expression and the growth of students' expres-
sive powers. Thus in these years the creative and developmental aspects ofthe
teaching of writing diverged. Creative writing was formed by partitioning off
"self-expression" from a concern with the communication of ideas and
proficiency in usage.
Under its own name creative writing was first taught by Hughes Meams
(1 875-1965). A dramatist manque and self-styled "writing man"-like Wendell,
he published unsuccessful novels and came to be known primarily for his
writings on the teaching of writing-Mearns was hired in 1920 to take charge
ofthe high-school English curriculum at the Lincoln School, the progressivist
laboratory school of Teachers College, Columbia. Between 1920 and his
resignation to accept a position at New York University in 1925, Mearns
conducted the "deliberate experiment" of replacing English in the curriculum
with creative writing. But again like Wendell, Mearns was something more th
a mere teacher of creative writing; he was also a publicist for a wholesale
"creativist" reformation of literary study. In two widely read books of the
Twenties, Creative Youth (1925) and CreativePower(1929), Mearns reported
the findings of his experiment at the Lincoln School and issued a challenge to
other teachers to followhis lead. In factthe use ofthe phrase "creative writing"
inthe earlierbooktoreferto a course of study is what bestowed uponthe subject
the name by which it has been known ever after. So popular were Meams's books
among teachers and parents-Robert Frost, himself an occasional teacher of
creative writing, touted the second volume as "the best story ofa feat ofteaching
ever written"-and so rapidly were his materials swung into place in schools
across the country that, within a decade of Mearns's original experiment,
creative writing had received the imprimatur of the National Council of
Teachers of English.
In Mearns's view, English was "not a branch of study, an isolated and
obvious exercise at certain hours ofthe day, but rather something that comes out
of the everyday activities of our children, something called forth by the actual
needs of everyday expression."43 Thus the entrance of creative writing onto the
educational scene was announced both by an attack on the formalism of current
English studies and by a desire to exhibit the academic forms of English study
as occupying a subordinate place in human experience. Taught as if for make-
believe literary scholars, English is "bookish lectures and bookish pother
among the bibliographies," Mearns said."4 For those who are preparing to take
their place among the propertied class
43 Hughes Mearns, "English as an Expression of the Activities of Everyday Life," Journal

of Educational Method, 2 (1923), 286.
4 Hughes Mearns, Creative Youth: How a School Environment Set Free the Creative Spirit
(Garden City, N.Y., 1925), 57.
it is clean hands and a pure collar; it is the possession of great-

grandparents-white, Christian preferred; it is the achievement of
tolerance; it is the proper use of "shall" and "will";... it is a five-foot
shelf of books; it is twenty thousand a year; it is a sight of truth and a
draught of wisdom; it is a frock coat and pearl gloves.45
Thus Mearns travestiedthe philological and humanistic conceptions of literary

study respectively, but the underlying complaint is a profound one. For on
neither ofthese conceptions does literature have any real use in human life.
Yet literature was not given a merely instrumental function in Mearns's
thinking. Itwouldbe more accurate to characterize writing as the efficient cause
of an education in which the final cause is personal growth. Meamns said that in
his statements on writing instruction the discussion was "always of self-
expression as a means of growth, and not of poetry [as such] .... The business o
making professional poets is still another matter-with which this writer has
never had the least interest."46 Personal growth as an educational ideal is of
course a Deweyan concept. In Dewey it is conceived "intrinsically" rather than
by comparison with adult standards; growth is "the power to grow"; it is not
something that is done to children, "it is something they do."47 As an admirer
ofDewey (Creative Youth is dedicatedto him), Mearns shared this understand-
ing of personal growth. The aim in teaching creative writing, Mearns said, was
"to touch some ofthe secret sources of [students'] lives, to discover and to bring
out the power that they possessed but, through timidity or ignorance, could not
use; to develop personality, in short."48
From this viewthe educational value ofliterature is that it is perhaps the best
means that humans have devised to touch the secret sources of their lives. But
if it is to do so, it must be learned from within. It is not to be learned about, but
experienced firsthand. The student ofliterature, Meams said, mustbe "a literary
person, a maker of literature."49 As a consequence the emphasis must be, "not
upon the teaching of the laws and principles of art as something to be learned
outside of experience, but upon knowing them sensitively through continuous
experience."50 In its broadest outlines this is the proverbial doctrine of learning
by doing, but Mearns reinterpreted it to mean that students learn most readily
(and most genuinely) "by self-activity self-approved and, if possible, self-
initiated."51 In short, students learn to write neither directly from a teacher nor
45 William Hughes Mearns, "Our Medieval High Schools: Shall We Educate Children for
the Twelfth or the Twentieth Century?" Saturday Evening Post, 184 (March 2, 1912), 19.
46 Hughes Mearns, Creative Power (Garden City, N.Y., 1929), 119-20.
47 John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy ofEducation
(New York, 1916), 42. Emphasis in the original.
48 Mearns, Creative Power, 14-15.
49 Hughes Mearns, "Creative Education in College Years," Progressive Education, 23
(1946), 269.
50 Hughes Mearns, The Creative Adult: Self-Education in the Art of Living (New York,
1940), 263.
51 Hughes Mearns, "Golden Lads and Girls," Survey, 50 (1926), 320.
290 D. G. Myers
by mere exactness of study and multiplicity of reading; they learn by the

continuous experience of developing themselves as literary persons, as makers
of literature.
What then is the role of books and teachers? Mearns insisted that some
teaching is required in learning howto write; trusting to natural endowment (the
intrinsic power all students possess) is necessary but not sufficient. "If growth
under pleasantly free surroundings were all ofthe new education," he acknowl-
edge, "then my occupation is gone; for I conceive of my professional skill as
something imperatively needed to keep that growth nourished."52 How does a
teacher nourish that growth? By giving students "immediate experience with
something better than they have hitherto known.""
Thus Mearns's plan was never to teach creative writing by itself, isolated
from the study of literary texts. In his plan writing came first, reading after: "the
interest in literature has followed rather than preceded the writing of literature,"
he said.54 The criterion of selection was the actual needs of creative self-
expression-the students' own needs as working writers. "The main result" of
literary study, Mearns asserted, must always be
to uncheck the flow of expression; for if my answers depend solely

upon my own experience I speak out freely and without fear, but if I
am held wholly to thinking based upon another's experience, or to an
alien and unfamiliar form of speech, I am robbed atthe start ofthe very
instruments ofindependentjudgment.55
So the reading in his creative writing classes was not the classics, or what he
scorned as "the reiterated dead giants of the past."56 Students sought out their
own reading, and since they were struggling with the problem of writing they
naturally turned for answers to contemporary writers-Masefield, Sandburg,
William Rose Benet, Alfred Noyes, Millay, Amy Lowell, James Oppenheim,
Vachel Lindsay, Adelaide Crapsey, Frost, and "the type of poets who [were]
found mainly in the Dial," including T. S. Eliot, though Mearns's students
"were not particularly interested in Eliot."57 Creative writing may thus appear
to be a precursor of demands to "open up the literary canon," but it is more
accurate to say that under creative writing a principle ofusefulness or suitability-a
twist on the notion of decorum-replaces that ofcanonicity. Although Mearns
said that he sometimes suggested poets from among his favorite Elizabethans
52 Hughes Mearns, "The Creative Spirit and Its Significance for Education," in Creative
Expression, ed. Gertrude Hartman and Ann Schumaker (Milwaukee, 1932), 19.
53 Mearns, "Creative Spirit," 20.
54 Mearns, Creative Youth, 55.
56 Hughes Mearns, "Creative Learning," in Challenges to Education, War and Post-War,
30th Annual Schoolmen's Week Proceedings (Philadelphia, 1943), 165.
57 Mearns, Creative Youth, 50n.
and pre-Raphaelites, he added that he thought of these suggested readings as a

variety of criticism; and so he would offerthem only to students who felt balked
byalackoftechnique and only whenthey hadputapiece ofworkbehindthem.Y'
Even then the suggestions were made unimperatively, in the voice of a fellow
writer who had acquired perhaps a wider experience. "With these pupils,"
Mearns explained, "we have taken the attitude of writing persons who meet to
discuss values and effects in our chosen art."59
Mearns believed he had rediscovered an old way to teach literature:
"creative reading," he called it, "a new term for a very old art."60 It is what
many teachers ofcreative writing still claim to be teaching, although under a still
newer term: reading as a writer.61 At Mearns's hands, in any event, creative
writing became an integrated approach to the study of reading and the practice
of writing in which literary inquiry (if it may be called that) was motivated and
guided by a desire not merely to know what good poems are but also to write
them, and in writing them to learn by necessity what makes them good. Hence
the objective was not to turn out official writers-Mearns disavowed any
interest in that-but rather to educate readers who had integrated within
themselves the necessary connection, the profound dependency, of established
literature upon the activity of writing. The hope was that at the very least this
would create a more sophisticated readership for official writers. "[W]hile the
number of poets cannot be increased by education," Meams quoted James
Oppenheim as saying of his efforts at the Lincoln School, "what we can hope
for is that 'audience interminable' which Walt Whitman prophesied; an Americ
where art is a living thing."62
By 1931 an English Journal survey found that forty-one colleges and

universities had adopted "some form of creative writing as part of the curricu-
lum."63 But college creative writing atthis time was avague and aimless pursuit,
one halfcomposition, one halfcreative self-expression. Itsform, inotherwords,
was Wendell's gift to the course, while its content was Mearns's. At the
University of Pennsylvania, for example, what could perhaps have been called
"creative writing" was not called by that name. The subject consisted ofcourses
in advanced composition, with a portion of the time yielded up to "creative
experiments." Composition teachers at Pennsylvania were "primarily inter-
ested," one of them said, "not in art but in a process of mental and spiritual
58 Mearns, "Creative Learning," 159.

59 Hughes Mearns, ed., Lincoln Verse, Story, andEssay, First Series (New York, 1923), xiv.
61 This term seems to have originated with R. V. Cassill's textbook Writing Fiction (New
York, 1963).
62 Mearns, "Golden Lads," 333.
63 Snow Longley Housh, "Report on Creative Writing in Colleges," English Journal,
college ed., 20 (1931), 672.
292 D. G. Myers
development taki
Iowa, where creative writing would come into its inheritance, a professor of
story writing insisted that "the making or training of professional writers is not
the business of creative composition.... The real objective is the development of
a pupil's capacity for creative experience."65
These were significant precedents, but they were not the beginnings of
creative writing in the university. Although it was taught here and there,
haphazardly, creative writing as auniversity discipline was not instituted as the
unforeseen consequence of a dozen haphazard experiments-or even three
dozen-operating undernearly as many aliases. It was a deliberate effort carried
out for an articulate purpose in a single place, and as such it was founded by
Nornan Foerster (1887-1972). Already well-known as a New Humanist, a
disciple of Irving Babbitt, who had editedthe movement's collective manifesto
Humanism andAmerica, Foerster was hired away from the University ofNorth
Carolina in 1930 to assume directorship ofthe newly created School of Letters
at the University of Iowa. The School of Letters had been set up to create a
centralized unit (in the words of Iowa's dean of liberal arts) to foster and develop
the common areas of literary study.66 And Foersterhadaplan for doingjustthis.
Only the year before, in a briefpolemic he named TheAmerican Scholar, he had
set forth a "scheme of education in letters." In fourteen years at Iowa, between
1930 and 1944, Foerster worked to put his scheme into effect.
In the view outlined in TheAmerican Scholarthe common areas of literary
study are original writing and criticism. Foerster characterized these as the "new
disciplines" (or, alternately, the "lost provinces") of graduate study in litera-
ture. They had been suppressed by the interests of literary scholarship during the
nineteenth century, but Foerster was convinced that "the age of philology and
minute historical research [was] drawing to a close."67 His plan was to
reemphasize the neglected areas of literary study and in doing so restore "the
traditional alliance of scholarship and criticism, the divorce ofwhichhas worked
injury to both and played havoc with education."68
Thus the literary education mapped out by Foersterwas a conscious reform.
As he confided somewhat later, the Iowa School of Letters was an effort to take
the lead in a national movement to break the stranglehold of philology and
historical research over the academic study of literature. Foersterwas confident
that the very introduction of two new disciplines-criticism and creative
64 Matthew Wilson Black, "Creative Writing in the College," in Hartman and Schumaker,
eds., Creative Expression, 248.
65 John T. Frederick, "The Place of Creative Writing in American Schools," Eng
Journal, college ed., 22 (1933), 11.
66 See Frances Mary Flanagan, The Educational Role of Norman Foerster (unpublished
Ph.D. dissertation, University of Iowa, 1971), 101.
67 Nornan Foerster, The American Scholar: A Study in Litterae Inhumaniores (Chapel Hill,
N.C., 1929), 44.
68 Foerster, American Scholar, 42.
writing-would enforce a more coherent and unified conception of literary

study. At all events, criticism and creative writing would be (as one of his
assistants phrased it) natural allies in any such movement. But criticism would
be the senior partner. As Austin Warren wrote in April 1930 congratulating
Foerster on his appointment, "You are to create, I take it, the sort of graduate
school of criticism you plead for so eloquently in The American Scholar."69
Criticism was the banner under which the opponents of philological and
historical scholarship, many of whom were normally hostile to one another,
joined in common cause.70 Their efforts to win a place for critics on the faculty
of English in American universities were so successful that, a quarter century
later, Alfred Kazin could say as if it were self-evident that critics "seem to
belong there....".71 It was not so obvious that writers belonged there too, but in
the Thirties criticism and creative writing were part of a mutual effort to make
over and improve the university study of literature. To Foerster's mind,
moreover, they were complementary aspects of literary study. As he explain
inhis inaugural address, literature inthe Iowa School ofLetters would be studie
from both the creative and critical points of view. Approaching literature from
the creative point of view, he said, means "[w]e are to study it from the insid
we are to see it, so far as possible, with the eyes ofthe creative artist."72 The aim
as he had put it in TheAmerican Scholar, was "to assist in an inner comprehen
sion of art."73 But the aim was comprehension: creative writing was an effort of
critical understanding conducted from withinthe conditions of literary practice.
The critic, Foerster said, "needs a type of mind akin to that of the creative
writing."74 And by conversion the writer needs the mind of a critic.
Thus creative writing on Foerster's conception was the acquisition of a
certain type of knowledge entailed in a certain type of practice, but it was not a
merely professional grounding in a current manner of living, a glib and
superficial training in what Foerster scorned as "practical shortcuts and trade
tricks."75 He did not intend creative writing to become a freestanding apparatus
of courses, an autonomously constituted "workshop," leading to a separate
degree. It was to be a branch of literary study designated for all types of literary
students-critics, writers, scholars, and teachers. A thorough education in
literature, Foerster said, means
69 Letter in Norman Foerster papers.

70 For a thorough account of the critical movement see Gerald Graff, Professing Literature:
An Institutional History (Chicago, 1987), 121ff.
71 Alfred Kazin, "The Writer and the University," in The Inmost Leaf: A Selection of
Essays (New York, 1955), 242.
72 Norman Foerster, "Language and Literature," in University of Iowa Studies, Series on
Aims and Progress of Research 33, ed. John William Ashton (Iowa City, 1931), 115.
74 Norman Foerster, "Literary Scholarship and Criticism," English Journal, college ed.,
25 (1936), 228.
75 Norman Foerster, The American State University: Its Relation to Democracy (Chapel
Hill, N.C., 1937), 124.
294 D. G. Myers
the development of a whole set of powers that should be active in the

study of literature. It means the development not only ofa [philological]
sense of fact and a [historical] sense of time ... but it means also the
development of aesthetic responsiveness, ofthe ability to handle ideas,
oftaste and judgment orthe critical sense, andthe power of writing and
speaking in the sensitive language appropriate to literary discussion.76
On Foerster's conception, creative writing could never be the whole of a

literary education for writers. In general it was intended as one small part of a
larger effort to humanize the literary curriculum by assisting all students of
literature toward an inner comprehension of the art. For writers in particular it
was to act as an inducement to submit themselves to a thorough education in
literature. In the early Thirties there was little opportunity for them to do so. The
writers of the day, Foerster observed, were "lamentably uneducated."77 They
were satisfied to be knowledgeable about the literary currents of the day, or as
Foerster phrased it, they were "elate in their contemporaneity."78 Justly
scornful of literary scholars who were "unhappily indifferentto the letters ofthe
present," they themselves were as often "unhappily indifferent to the letters of
the past."79 What resulted from this, Foerster believed, was that writers had
become "largely content with problems oftechnique," little interested in their
work to present "a compelling picture of human excellence."80
The fault lay as muchwiththe universities as withthe writers. In an address
delivered atthe firstIowa Writers' Conference in October 1931, Foersternoted
that "[t]here is little indication that our institutions of higher learning are
concerned with providing a program of study and an intellectual and emotional
atmosphere suitable for 'mere' writers. "81 Creative writing at Iowa was origi-
nally intended to provide such a program of study-not merely a two-year hitch
of writing seminars (as it is at present)82 but a sequence of courses in non-
contemporary texts and authors, criticism, literary history, and even the history
and structure of the English language. The aim was to do more than turn out
official writers, although such aprogram would do that, too. The aim (as Foerster
had said) was also to develop a whole set of powers in these writers: aesthetic
responsiveness, the ability to handle ideas; in sum, the critical sense.
76 University of North Carolina Daily Tar Heel, March 27, 1932. Clipping in Foerster
papers.
78 Norman Foerster, American Criticism: A Study in Literary Theory from Poe to the
Present (Boston, 1928), 228.
79 Foerster, "Language and Literature," 117.
80 Norman Foerster, "A University Prepared for Victory," in The Humanities after the
War, ed. Foerster (Princeton, 1944), 29-30.
81 Norman Foerster, "Author and Alma Mater," typescript of an unpublished essay in
Foerster papers.
82 See Marion Perry, "America's Master of Fine Arts Programs: Course Requirements,"
in Creative Writing in America: Theory and Pedagogy, ed. Joseph M. Moxley (Urbana, 1989),
261-65.
As conceived by Foerster, then, creative writing was sharply distinguished

from the subject conceived by Mearns. As a humanist, Foerster was decidedly
hostile to the ideas of creative self-expression. He did not think that most
students-notevenmost students ofwriting-neededthe continuous activity of
expressing themselves. "Expression is a kind of solipsism," he declared,
"based on the view that the self can know and depict only its own states."83 On
Foerster's view, learning to write was not merely learning to express onesel
was also learning to assimilate and make use of the cultural values implicit
within the forms of writing. "Each student has, it seems," Foerster said,
characterizing the theory of creative expression, "what Walt Whitman called a
'precious idiocracy'-precious to that student ifnotprecious to the world-and
he should therefore have a chance to be 'creative.' "s84 Foerster agreedthat every
student should have a chance to be creative, at least every graduate student in
English. But in order to come truly into possession of creative power, he was
convinced, a writer must ally his "precious idiocracy" to a discipline of
ideas-that is, to a critical power.
This then was the reason Foerster sought to institute a program for writers
among others. They needed to be educated as plainly as did anyone else who
hoped to get a living out of literature-critics, historical and textual scholars,
even mere teachers. For all these the goal of a literary education would be to
achieve a careful balance of liberalism and professionalism-writers and critics
with a solid foundation of humane learning, teachers and scholars with a
firsthand awareness, from the inside, of the technical problems of the subject
they expected to study and teach. Each would be prepared for a professional
career, but liberally rather than vocationally-with a view to the enduring
standards embodied in any great literary performance rather than the tricks and
shortcuts entailed in a merely current manner of living.
After his resignation in a dispute with the Iowa administration in 1944,
Foerster expected the School of Letters to be dismantled. Creative writing (he
predicted) would be the first thing to go. "[Y]et it is thriving," he marveled to
an interviewer in the Sixties, "and is ... used probably too much today."85
Although it may be used too much today, creative writing thrives because
it fills a lack in contemporary culture. Starting in the Forties, its institutional
83 Norman Foerster, "The Education of a Writer," typescript of an unpublished essay in

Foerster papers.
84 Foerster, "Education of a Writer."
85 Alice Worsley, notes toward a projected biography, typescript in Foerster papers. The
exact nature of the controversy that led to Foerster's resignation seems to have been this. A
recently appointed dean of liberal arts proposed to eliminate all classes in history and foreign
languages from the graduate requirements at Iowa; Foerster countered with a proposal to
eliminate all requirements in social science. The dean was a social scientist. Whether he sought
Foerster's removal or Foerster volunteered to resign is unclear. Originally Foerster had hoped,
as he wrote to his old friend Gerald F. Else in May 1944, to "stay on for a few years as a professor
concemed with graduate students and my own studies" (letter in Foerster papers). In the end
he moved on to Duke.
296 D. G. Myers
structure became increasingly professionalized.86 The tendency was to use

creative writing as a machine for turning out professional writers, and the
symbol for this was the advanced degree Master ofFine Arts, which increasingly
became the aspiration of creative writing students. The reason is not hard to
guess. The pressure to adapt creative writing to the economic needs of writers,
to convert it into akindofpatronage system, was too difficultto resist, especially
since it was the writers themselves who were staffing the positions of institu-
tional command. Yet the ideas behind creative writing did not evaporate. A tight
distinction must be drawn between the social practice of creative writing, which
evolved into a livelihood for writers and (if you please) a licensing bureau for
literary trainees, and the cultural value embodied in any plan for treating
literature not merely as a corpus ofknowledge but also as a productive art. From
this angle, the unresolved conflict over the materials ofcreative writing-whether
it ought to seek Wendell's deliberate cultivation of personal experience,
Mearns's creative self-expression, or Foerster's picture of human excellence
nailed solidly to a framework of ideas-is far less important than the method of
creative writing, which is an effort to bring study and practice, literature a
knowledge that and literature as a knowledge how, into one system.
Nowhere else in the culture is such a unified conception of literature to be
found. The formerpartners ofcreative writing have become specialized: English
composition is focused closely upon writing appropriate to the world ofpractical
affairs, while criticism has ascended into theory. Like rhapsodes, the new
professors ofthese subjects might almostbe imaginedto complainthatthey lose
attention and have absolutely no ideas of the least value and practically fall
asleep when anyone speaks of any other conception of literature. Not so the
writer, who is characterized by devotion to the whole of literature. As Howard
Nemerov observes,
86 Once creative writing had been set firmly on foot at Iowa, the argument began to be heard
that colleges and universities ought to provide economic support for writers-by hiring them
"to teach, in their leisure, the profession of writing.... Surely it is a natural development of the
function of a university or college devoted to liberal education to take up where society leaves
off the preservation, maintenance, and insemination of the profession of letters" (R. P.
Blackmur, "A Feather-Bed for Critics," in The Expense of Greatness [New York, 1940], 284-
85; emphasis in original). Allen Tate inaugurated the Creative Arts Program at Princeton in
1939, and Blackmur succeeded him the next year; Elliott Coleman founded the writing seminars
at Johns Hopkins in 1945; story writer Peter Taylor was hired to teach creative writing at the
Women's College of North Carolina in 1946, and the poet Randall Jarrell joined him the
following year, although the school (since renamed the University of North Carolina at
Greensboro) did not formally institute a program for another two decades; Stanford began its
fellowship program in writing in 1947, the same year that Alan Swallow started the program
at Denver; and Baxter Hathaway founded the program at Cornell in 1948. The novelist Wallace
Stegner-who founded Stanford's program-described these efforts as a professional collabo-
ration between universities and writers. See Stegner, "Writing as Graduate Study," College
English, 11 (1950), 429-32.
For such a man, art is an act of fait

Prayer the study of it, as Blake say
And praise the practice; nor does he divide
Making from teaching, or from theory.
The three are one, and in his hours of art
There shines a happiness through the darkest themes,
As though spirit and sense were not at odds.87
This is a devotion that can never be more than imperfectly realized. At no

university in this country has there ever been an entirely satisfactory integration
of literary study with literary practice. It remains an act of faith, an idea within
the idea of the university, but no less a historical fact for that.
Texas A & M University.
87 Howard Nemerov, "The Painter Dreaming in the Scholar's House," Collected Poems
(Chicago, 1977), 433.

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The Rise of Creative Writing

Whetherpoets are born or made is amysterythatremains unsolved, buthow

citing ancient pre

its pedigree is overlooked frequently but nevertheless exists from the

This is a ludicrous hodgepodge, but the historical error implicit within it is

writers, but an institutional arrangem

But creative writing is new. It is true that, in the English-speaking world as

8 Richard Hugo, "In Defense of Creative-Writing Classes," in The Triggering Town:

9 Michael Drayton, "To My Most Dearley-Loved Friend Henery Reynolds Esquire," in

anything closer to present concerns, at least according to one of their former

Philology almost completely drove outthe humanistic ideal, forwhatphilology

A small biographical history of literature served for a textbook and an

13 Adams Sherman Hill, Our English (New York, 1889), 75.

In short, English literature was conceived as a body ofknowledge-orperhaps

were taught as distinct branches. One was an account of the lives of

17 Francis H. Stoddard, "Literary Spirit in the Colleges," Educational Review, 6 (1893),

This was the milieu from which cre

ofbooks."26 So the teaching ofwritin

purpose of the stud

33 Wendell, Mystery, 210.

The renovations in the teaching of writing put into effect at Harvard

43 Hughes Mearns, "English as an Expression of the Activities of Everyday Life," Journal

it is clean hands and a pure collar; it is the possession of great-

Thus Mearns travestiedthe philological and humanistic conceptions of literary

by mere exactness of study and multiplicity of reading; they learn by the

to uncheck the flow of expression; for if my answers depend solely

and pre-Raphaelites, he added that he thought of these suggested readings as a

By 1931 an English Journal survey found that forty-one colleges and

58 Mearns, "Creative Learning," 159.

writing-would enforce a more coherent and unified conception of literary

69 Letter in Norman Foerster papers.

the development of a whole set of powers that should be active in the

On Foerster's conception, creative writing could never be the whole of a

As conceived by Foerster, then, creative writing was sharply distinguished

83 Norman Foerster, "The Education of a Writer," typescript of an unpublished essay in

structure became increasingly professionalized.86 The tendency was to use

For such a man, art is an act of fait

This is a devotion that can never be more than imperfectly realized. At no

Texas A & M University.

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