Creative Writing in the Academy

During the thirty-five years I taught creative writing at a large midwestern university, I gave little thought to the history of the discipline—if indeed it is a discipline and not simply, as some scholars have implied, a clever way of employing writers who are not good enough to make a living at their art. If a subject with such a bad reputation within the professoriate can survive and prosper in academia, it can be for only one reason: it attracts students in numbers large enough not only to pay for itself but to underwrite many less popular (though more respectable) academic enterprises.

The reasons for creative writing's popularity, like the reasons for its tolerance within the skeptical academy, are barely touched upon in D. G. Myers's scholarly and ostensibly objective study. Myers brings to his subject a wealth of information on the history of education in America and documents his account with an amplitude of quotations, a plethora of footnotes, and a shrewd analysis of administrative strategies. We learn, for instance, that creative writing "first saw light as a conservative reform . . . founded on the humanistic argument that literature is not a genre of knowledge but a mode of aesthetic and spiritual cultivation." The reformers were reacting to the "German scientific method"—employed by the philologists who dominated English departments in the early to mid-nineteenth century—that they believed had reduced literary scholarship to a dry accumulation of verifiable facts and figures. By adding writing, whether of poetry or prose, to the curriculum, the New Humanists hoped to show their students that literature was a living art, each work "a lasting act of creative imagination," as Myers calls it, that could be experienced "from the inside"—i.e. through the mind of its creator.

The problem with this innovation, as many scholars soon found, was that writing instruction is a labor-intensive activity. Discarding the prescriptive methods of classical rhetoric, the teachers of these new courses generally required large amounts of student writing. Of course someone had to read, correct, and evaluate this writing, and soon serious scholars, such as Francis J. Child, Harvard's Boylston professor of rhetoric and oratory, were lamenting the many hours they were forced to spend on bundles of student themes, much to the detriment of their own research. Eager to keep their top dogs happy, the wily administrators of the nation's elite colleges and universities began looking elsewhere for their writing staffs. They hit upon poets and journalists, largely because of their interest in craft and because those professions were so notoriously underpaid that even a professor's salary looked good in comparison.

By the late nineteenth century many American institutions were hiring real working writers to staff their composition courses, and inevitably these writer-teachers began to shape both the methods and purposes of such instruction. Initially there had been no distinction between composition and creative writing, since students could submit a wide variety of "personal compositions." The new writing teachers, however (such as Barrett Wendell of Harvard, whose Gothic romances were dismal failures, but whose course in advanced composition was so influential Myers calls it the "true beginning of creative writing"), took "a writer's approach" to their subject. They emphasized craft and technique, which tend to be genre specific, and they judged a piece of writing largely in terms of its appeal to readers. Thus creative writing began to mean fiction and poetry, while composition was limited to nonfiction or academic prose. The end in view shifted from the appreciation of literature (as the humanists had envisioned) to its production; and though they had not been explicitly hired to do so, these teachers were soon trying to groom their students for literary careers of their own.

A few early teachers, such as the poet Alfred Noyes at Princeton, could claim some notable successes (though both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson disparaged his influence); yet for the most part these courses produced dedicated...