Like most young men and women nearing the end of college, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was undecided about the choice of a career. "I most eagerly aspire after future eminence in literature, my whole soul burns ardently after it, and every earthly thought centers in it," he wrote to his father, seeking advice. "Surely, there never was a better opportunity offered for the exertion of literary talent in our own country than is now offered.

"To be sure," he granted, "most of our literary men thus far have not been professedly so, until they have studied and entered the practice of Theology, Law, or Medicine." But Longfellow was afraid that studying for a profession would only mean lost time. His father thought otherwise. "A literary life, to one who has the means of support, must be very pleasant," he replied. "But there is not wealth enough in this country to afford encouragement and patronage to literary men."1

And so in 1829 Longfellow became a professor. Although he did not publish a book of poetry until he had been teaching for a decade, Longfellow was the first American writer of any importance to choose an academic career to fill his stomach while his soul burned after literature. And though he quit the professoriate at the first opportunity—in 1854, just as soon as he could support himself on the earnings from his writing—Longfellow was an important precursor of twentieth-century writers who faced a similar economic dilemma and who arrived at a similar career choice. Unlike more recent writers, though, Longfellow did not support himself by teaching something called creative writing. He was a teacher of languages. "Poetic dreams shaded by irregular French verbs!" he scribbled in his journal. "Hang it! I wish I were a free man."2

This is a book about American writers’ efforts to have academic careers and their freedom too—the freedom, that is, to teach creative writing. Since the Second World War, perhaps the majority of American writers have shaded their poetic dreams by teaching in universities and colleges. "Writers have become dependent on academies," observes a recent critic, "for the peace and funds with which to pursue their art."3 Once in the university, they have had to do something in return for the funds, and what they have done is to set up programs in creative writing. At last count there were more than 300 such programs granting more than 1,000 degrees a year. "Together they’ve probably turned out 75,000 official ‘writers,’" John Barth says.4

Estimates peg the professional success rate for graduates in creative writing at about one percent (as compared to 90 percent for graduates of medical school), but it seems no less true that the road to professional success in contemporary literature twists through the programs in creative writing. A glance at the contributors’ notes to the literary magazines or anthologies of "new" and "younger" writers confirms the widely shared impression that for an entire generation of American writers a tour of duty in a graduate writers’ workshop followed by a life of teaching creative writing has been the standard training and common experience of its time. As Wallace Stegner said, "[N]early every American writer you can name is associated either with some academy or with the academic lecture-platform circuit."5 Of the 134 poets chosen to appear in The Best American Poetry for 1990 and 1991, for example, all but twenty or so—85 percent—were affiliated with the enterprise of creative writing in one capacity or another, as graduates, professors, or administrators. Sometimes they were all three.

"The historical explanation for the close collaboration between American writers and American academic institutions is hard to disentangle," says a historian of modern authorship.6 This book is an attempt to disentangle the collaboration. It pursues the teaching of writing by writers from the 1880s, when an elective course in advanced composition was offered for the first time at Harvard, down to the present day, when (or so it was predicted not too long ago) workshops in creative writing would be made "available to anyone in America within safe driving distance of his home." 7 The story is new—historically, since it begins late in the nineteenth century; but also historiographically, since it has never been told before. Several years ago a historian lamented: "We have libraries on the history of universities but very little historical work on the social and intellectual forms of modern scholarship."8 Since then a number of books have been published on the study and teaching of English, most notably Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature (1987). There have been volumes on the teaching of English since the sixteenth century, the study of American literature, rhetoric and basic writing instruction, the economics of English departments, professional writing instruction, the politics of English composition, writing groups, and writing across the curriculum. But a full-length history of creative writers teaching creative writing has not yet appeared.9

One reason for the neglect is that creative writing has more often been a subject for debate than history. The debate has been carried on with such partisan indignation that different people seem to be talking about radically different things when they talk about creative writing. On one side are those who blame it for an astonishing array of ills: the collapse of literary standards, an overproduction of homogeneously bad writing, the decadence of the age. For them, creative writing has been (according to one critic) a "catastrophe." On the other side are those who defend creative writing as a democratization of culture and a happy awakening of interest in literature and the literary life, a sign of the age’s vitality. For them it has been a "service." Obviously the same thing cannot in itself be both. What is less obvious is why it should be either.10

Other explanations must be sought, and in this book I seek the explanation in history. What goes unexamined in the debate over creative writing are the reasons for its triumph, the original argument for the subject which apparently struck some people at one time as sound and even persuasive. The current debate starts at the end, explaining how creative writing now operates, but not why. Perhaps it would be well to return to the beginning, by means of history. The idea of hiring writers to teach writing has never won unquestioned acceptance nor has creative writing—the classroom subject—progressed much beyond apologizing for itself. Even at a time when it was growing and spreading rapidly, as Kingsley Amis recalls in his Memoirs, creative writing was "often ridiculed . . . by those who knew nothing of it."11 Despite the ridicule, writers met surprisingly little resistance in taking their place on university faculties, and once it was proposed creative writing was adopted fairly quickly as a subject of university instruction. This book is intended neither to defend the honor of campus writers nor to heap more ridicule upon them; it is merely a history, an effort to explain how writing came to be taught in large and growing numbers by writers on university campuses. Any contribution that I could make to the debate would contribute little to historical understanding. I don’t mean to pretend that I am neutral on the subject. I agree with the late Lucy S. Dawidowicz that "as long as historians respect the integrity of their sources and adhere strictly to the principles of sound scholarship," their sympathies and commitments "do not distort, but instead they enrich, historical writing."12 I readily admit that I am sympathetic to the original idea behind creative writing, the vision of literature and literary study that inspired the men and women who originated it.

But though I am sympathetic to it, I am committed neither to creative writing in its present condition nor to any plan to repair it. My concern is not that of the debater, who argues the status quo ante must be altered or preserved, but that of the historian, for whom the present situation arouses a curiosity to know how things got to be this way. Yet I shall be asked to declare my allegiance, to confess my bias, for these days it is the common opinion that all humanistic scholarship is written from a point of view; that is, by someone who has a stake in the outcome. And I shall not be believed if I protest that the question of bias or allegiance is simply irrelevant, since in this book I am doing something different in kind from taking sides. So—I acknowledge that I have written this book out of an allegiance to the old discredited liberal principle that knowledge is its own end, distinct from its practical effects. Not only do I have little to gain or lose from what happens to creative writing—I am not too worried about the practical effects of this historical account—but more to the point I have dedicated myself to promulgating the views of creative writing’s founders. And it was for the sake of advancing the principle that literature is an end in itself that creative writing was established in the first place.

Originally the teaching of writing in American universities ("creative" or otherwise) was an experiment in education. Creative writing as such emerged out of this experiment, gradually taking shape over the six decades from 1880 to the Second World War. In the beginning it was not a scheme for turning out official writers or for providing them with the peace and funds with which to pursue their art. The goal—an educational one—was to reform and redefine the academic study of literature, establishing a means for approaching it "creatively"; that is, by some other means than it had been approached before that time, which was historically and linguistically. Over the next fifty years of its life creative writing slowly turned away from its original goal; and yet even then it retained a memory of its commitment to literature and literature’s place in education. From the first creative writing was an institutional arrangement for treating literature as if were a continuous experience and not a mere corpus of knowledge—as if it were a living thing, as if people intended to write more of it. Although the course requirements and sometimes even the exact title varied from place to place, creative writing was not merely various. Among the variety there was a principle of identity. Under the heading of creative writing, literature was conceived (in Michael Oakeshott’s phrase) as both an achievement and a promise, an inheritance of texts and a flexible set of methods and standards for generating new texts. Wherever it appeared, an education in writing arose as a challenge to any other conception of literature. Creative writing was the name that might have been given to any effort that undertook to restore the idea of literature as an integrated discipline of thought and activity, of textual study and practical technique. It was the study and practice of literature (or writing) for its own sake.

Why then does creative writing now seem like anything but this integration? As Gerald Graff said after officially reviewing the program at a major university, "[T]he writers were almost all practice-oriented, hostile or indifferent to [literary] criticism, much less theory, while the critics and theorists in the English department looked down with lordly indifference on mere contemporary writing. Each component [of the department] is beautifully and completely insulated from any danger of hearing the criticism of the other—and of course that’s the whole point, isn’t it?"13 In the hallways of the English department, exchanges between poets and scholars are marked by mutual hostility. The poets complain that literary study has "no point of contact with the concerns of most working poets"; the scholars dismiss creative writing as "pseudo-literature."14 The institutional situation is a far cry from what the founders of creative writing envisioned. What happened? Briefly this: in the decades following the Second World War, as the American university expanded under pressure from several different sources—the post-war demand for more democratic access, the demand for more education to compete with the Soviet Union after Sputnik, the sheer demand for more classroom space as the baby boom generation began to make itself felt in the mid-sixties—creative writing became one of the primary engines driving the expansion. It was a means for enlarging the university’s role in American society. It needed no further justification: if it was no longer undertaken for the sake of integrating literary study with literary practice, it could be pursued for its own sake—free of any other institutional responsibilities.

Now creative writing is not usually thought of in these terms. The only connection it is usually thought to have with literature and literary study is an economic or bureaucratic one—it is first an apprenticeship and then a livelihood. Even though there is no centralized control over it, creative writing seems to give every appearance of being an interlocking coast-to-coast system of patronage—a network of cash subsidies and allotments of time for writers just starting out, a quilt of academic sinecures for older, established authors. British novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson sighs enviously:

Writing itself may not qualify as a profession—it is neither a fulltime occupation nor the primary source of income for most writers—but the teaching of writing, by those who have some claim to be recognized writers, looks (on this view) like the next best thing. Dr. Johnson’s toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail have been replaced by two years in graduate school, an academic job at a comfortable salary, and permanent tenure. Only envy remains the lot of contemporary writers.

Yet this description raises a question. How was teaching hit upon as a form of patronage? It is an odd choice to say the least. Artists have always created what their patrons have asked for, and occasionally the academic situation of campus writers is blamed for the bloodlessness of their work—as a genre (it is said) creative writing is redolent of the classroom rather than experience. Mark Harris seems closer to the truth, though, when he points out the obvious: what the teaching of creative writing creates is students, not commissioned works of art.16 Creative writing arose in opposition to the German research ideal, and as such it was originally conceived not as a Wissenschaft—a medium for producing and expanding knowledge—but as a Bildung, a way of cultivating students’ appreciation of the literary art.17 Originally, then, teaching was the goal, not production and expansion. Today writers are hired and promoted in academe on the basis of their writing—it has become their equivalent of original research—and yet they have been less successful than academics in other fields at establishing institutional peer-review mechanisms for legitimizing their own work and excluding that of others. Anyone who wants to teach creative writing must be recognized or licensed as a writer—through publication or earning the Master of Fine Arts—but no one must teach creative writing in order to publish creative writing. There is a difference between the terms "writer" and "teacher of creative writing" that is not ordinarily so in the case of literary scholars, historians, sociologists, archaeologists, physicists, or oceanographers, for whom the roles of teacher and producer are combined as a matter of course. Even if it is the primary means of economic support for writers in these days, teaching remains only one possible means of support. Strictly speaking it is not a form of literary patronage at all. True enough, writers who also teach probably enjoy themselves more and fatigue themselves less than anyone who puts in a nine-to-five day for an insurance company or a bank; and they leave themselves more time for writing to boot. But if that is so their academic situation owes less to patronage and generosity than to writers’ own choices and career decisions. There are other ways to make a living and some of them even demand writing. Writers who teach for a living instead of reporting the news or working in public relations or ghost-writing other people’s books have chosen to do one thing instead of another. The teaching of creative writing might be more accurately described, then, as a surrogate for patronage, an occupation that has been consciously turned to (as Longfellow’s father said) in the absence of wealth enough in this country to afford encouragement and patronage to literary men and women.

Why teaching? For this reason: creative writing was originally established as a discipline of education, not as a livelihood for creative writers. Now any such interpretation will be at odds with the a priori assumption of a good many intellectual historians. Ever since N. R. Hanson’s Patterns of Discovery (1958) and Thomas S. Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1960) overturned the positivistic theory of scientific understanding, many historians have adopted the similar view—a commonplace in the sociology of knowledge—that the fields of university study as we know them are based not on scholarly discoveries but on scholarly authority; in historical terms, they took shape in the nineteenth century by a process of "professionalization."18 Steven Turner gives an excellent short version of how the fields of study were professionalized over time:

And Turner adds that "All of the professions, except possibly the clerical, were challenged (ultimately without success) by rival groups which coveted their status and privileges. . . ."19 Creative writing was the rare successful challenge. It did not take shape—at least not initially—by means of professionalization; it was a dissent from professionalization. On one hand it remained aloof from the professionalization of literary study, which pushed forward in the name of serious research and serious scholarship. And by contrast, the new discipline stood for teaching. On the other hand, it sought to preserve writing for something other than the practical, workaday uses to which it was being put by the rising profession of journalism. By contrast, the academic discipline believed in developing young people for creative (and not merely acquisitive) work.

Creative writing, then, first saw light as a conservative reform. But though it emerged as a challenge to professionalization, it was not founded on professional resentment. Although it repudiated humanism in other ways, it was founded on the humanistic argument that literature is not a genre of knowledge but a mode of aesthetic and spiritual cultivation. Unlike the exponents of other university disciplines—such as the American Philological Association (1869), Modern Language Association (1883), American Historical Association (1884), or the American Political Science Association (1889)—teachers of writing did not organize themselves into a professional body until 1967, when the Associated Writing Programs joined in common cause. Although professional writers had established an Authors League in 1912, they wavered between seeing themselves as a trade union or a business organization.20 For writing teachers there was no trade or professional affiliation of any kind; the new field was not defined in terms of its practitioners’ expertise. Creative writing was only professionalized later, in the 1970s, after it had already been secured as a retreat from literary professionalism. And even then it remained incompletely professionalized. Although the graduate writers’ workshops are sometimes described as professional schools, the creative writing establishment (if there is such a thing) has not succeeded in accrediting the schools.21 Creative writing began with the hiring of writers to teach writing, but it was not founded upon a bid for professional privilege; it was founded upon an idea. And to put it briefly, the idea was that writing ought to be pursued for its own sake—for the sake of cultivation—and not for the purpose of gaining a livelihood or for a more specialized knowledge. If Dr. Johnson was correct in the eighteenth century that "no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money," in the last hundred years or more—since the rise of creative writing, under the sway of its fundamental idea—men and women have blockheadedly written for the sake of writing, and have got their money by other devices; increasingly, by teaching writing.

This idea was one that had to be fought for, and still does to a large extent. Prior to the emergence of creative writing—throughout the period during which creative writing was taking shape, in fact—literature was studied in American colleges and universities as a means to some other end. Creative writing by contrast has been an effort to treat writing as an end in itself. As such, it has acted with hostility toward two different conceptions of literature and writing, which for convenience might be labeled the scholarly and the socially practical. On one side are those for whom literature is primarily a genre of knowledge—"a discipline deeply dependent upon knowledge," as one scholar says—and for whom literary learning, accordingly, is "a matter of making connections between a particular verbal text and a larger cultural text," where the cultural text is conceived as la race, le milieu, le moment, linguistic system, political ideology, body of theoretical propositions, or the like.22 On the other side are those for whom literature or writing is a social practice that serves either the dominant powers or the forces of opposition; for whom literary training, then, imparts either "the limited, functional writing skills needed to complete basic documents for school and work" or "skills which might be used to subvert the status quo."23 The one side has been content merely to understand literature, the other merely to use it. And in fact, scholarly and socially practical types have tended to reject the title of literature entirely, preferring "philology," "literary history," "critical theory," or "cultural studies" on the one hand and "rhetoric," "business English," "technical writing," or "composition" on the other.

Historically, creative writing has beckoned a third way. Although it was founded by writers, it was not created to give them (in Howard Nemerov’s words) a quiet life and a fairly agreeable way to make a dollar. Instead it was an effort on their part to bring the teaching of literature more closely in line with the ways in which (they believed) literature is genuinely created. The founders of creative writing were not themselves particularly important writers, in the eyes of their contemporaries or of history. And later, when more important writers began to teach creative writing, their immediate concern was still the correction of what they saw as a false view of literature being disseminated in the universities. They wished to substitute an approach that was grounded (in the words of one of their allies) on a practical experience of writing. They sought to impart the understanding of literature through a use of it. They demanded that literature be taught (in the sensible phrase of Allen Tate) as if people intended to write more of it. They wanted "to teach the writers of the past from the writer’s point of view," explained Paul Engle, director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop from 1942 to 1966, "as imaginative expressions of his agony and delight, rather than as historical instances." Creative writing was originally conceived as a means of teaching literature from the inside, as familiar experience, rather than from the outside, as exotic phenomenon. It was intended to be an elephant’s view of zoology.24

That in any event is what I argue in The Elephants Teach, although it is not an argument much in the air these days. What I am suggesting is that historically there has been a three-way split in English departments: the terrain has been carved up into sectors representing scholarship, social practices, and what I am going to refer to as constructivism, because the other terms—art, literature, imaginative expression—as Tate once said, have all been debased.25 It is more usual to suggest that there has been only a two-way split. The carving up, obvious to nearly everybody, is characterized in a number of ways, although perhaps the clearest (surely the most influential) has been James A. Berlin’s. At the outset of Rhetoric and Reality, his history of American writing instruction in the twentieth century, Berlin distinguishes between "rhetoric, the production of written and spoken texts, and poetic, the interpretation of texts. . . ."26 But though this is clear, upon closer inspection it shows itself as a rather neat-looking dichotomy. Without interpretation there would be no means of learning how texts are produced; and the production of any text is from another angle merely an interpretation—a version—of how it might be written or spoken. Production and interpretation can be analytically abstracted only in the context of what is already understood ("always already," I nearly said) as a concrete whole. After the fact they may be seen as distinct mental actions, but as a concrete experience the handling of texts—whatever the right name for it turns out to be—is a synthesis of the two. At most they are different freeze-frame instants in the same continuous loop of activity. The traditional distinction between rhetoric and poetic, still useful in our day, is not to be found here.

Again, the division in English departments is sometimes registered under the institutional aliases of composition and literary study. But these would seem merely to be translations into Latinate diction of the terms rhetoric and poetic, and in any case they do not clear away the conceptual confusion. While granting as much, Evan Watkins has suggested that they might be differentiated as economic functions. In Work Time, his study of English as a form of labor, Watkins argues that composition and literary study became entangled historically for the purpose of bringing about a new process of "cultural selection," a means for sorting young people into new occupations and classes.27 Literary study may have been sufficient for civilizing gentlemen, but technological advances and the rise of the professions made it necessary to turn out workers with compound and varied skills—the social ease of a gentleman, the practical ability of a manager. Although they may be conceptually distinguished, then, composition and literary study are really partners in the same economic enterprise. This is a deft analysis, but it leaves some questions unanswered: (a) What caused this tangled process to develop? (b) If the cause is something like economic forces, is this historical analysis itself also a product of those forces? (c) If not—if Watkins stands apart from economic forces in order to describe them—why could those who originally instituted English composition and literary study also not have stood apart from them? The gerrymandered map of English studies must be accounted for in some other way.

In this book I am going to base my own historical analysis upon the premise that scholarly research in English, the teaching of practical composition, and the constructivist handling of literature are three distinct "faculties" of study, thought, and activity in English, differentiated by aim and method, by the uses to which they put their materials, at times even unrelated to one another. In my view these partitiones scientiarum (or something like them) are what the history of English study has been all about, and so we are in the dark about English as long as we are in the dark about how it has been divided up. Composition, the constructive art of literature, and scholarship have been separate (if not rival) attempts to give definition and meaning to the field of English, reducing it to a self-consistent order of ideas, establishing sequence and precedence, making the whole interrelated, coherent. English itself is not a consistent order; its existence is bureaucratic (or "economic," if you prefer), not logical; to adapt a remark by García Márquez, like the United States it is less a name than the designation of a plurality of interests. For historical reasons, English has become home to several logically distinguishable and perhaps even mutually incompatible modes of activity—it is a "contradiction-crossed territory," in Evan Watkins’s phrase.28 But the contradictions are logical ones; scholarship, composition, and constructive literature operate from different postulates to different conclusions; and the explanation for their differences is to be sought, then, in the thinking that differentiates one from another.

This is the real "excluded conflict" in our histories of English study. Historians who concentrate upon the study of literature in English departments are faulted for ignoring the antagonism between composition and literary study, but historians who concentrate upon the teaching of English composition commit a similar fault. In Textual Carnivals, for example, Susan Miller aligns literature with composition. Originally both were "utilitarian means," she says, of replacing the classical curriculum in nineteenth-century colleges. But then Miller re-partitions them by noticing that "the ‘composition’ of this two-sided unity is [an] elementary [subject], insofar as it is always thought of as freshman ‘work,’ not as the study of writing throughout college."29 What seems to have escaped her notice is that writing is studied throughout college (and on into graduate school) under the name of creative writing. This suggests that Miller has slipped unknowingly from one use of the term literature to distinctly another. There are three units discernible in Miller’s account. First there are composition and literature I, aligned in a struggle against an established curriculum; then there are the non-aligned composition and literature II, the latter of which is considered a more advanced division of the curriculum. On this exhibition neither literature II (which does not include the study of writing) nor composition (which does not include advanced study) bear much resemblance to creative writing. That leaves literature I. She is basically correct, I think, to characterize this as a "utilitarian means"—a practical, institutional proposal, which includes the study of writing throughout college—for opposing a dominant curriculum, which does not include writing at all. Left out of account, though, is what became of the advanced study of writing on the way from literature I to literature II.

The problem, I would argue, lies in a currently fashionable view of literary study, which Miller herself represents earlier in her book as "reading, and only reading, texts that constitute the quasi-religious ideal of a textual canon."30 This view conceals two things. First, it conceals the fact that literary study is not "only reading"; it also consists of a productive component—a special kind of writing—that goes unexamined as a consequence. And second, it conceals the relationship of creative writing to the other sectors of the English department. In plain truth, there are two distinct uses of literature institutionalized within university departments of English. Literature I includes the advanced study of writing; literature II produces one kind of writing and consumes another, different kind.

What now passes for literary study often has little to do with literary texts, except as a quarry for scholarship. As Jerry Herron points out in Universities and the Myth of Cultural Decline, the real work of most English professors is the writing not of literary texts but of scholarly books and articles. What’s more, these books and articles are almost never assigned for class, students are not expected to know them, and few scholars are even inclined to read them. If course enrollments are any indication the true subject taught by English departments—though some scholars decline to recognize it as a subject at all—is composition. Most college students never take an advanced course in literature. "And even if they do," Herron observes, "they are no more likely to encounter a recognizable subject there, within the evacuated space of the academic classroom, where no real work ever takes place."31 In short literature as it is taught and studied now is two-faced. It chooses its materials from one set of texts but extracts its methods from another set, which is propounded in lectures and seminars as a vocabulary for saying that literature is such-and-such but which students are never taught how to read for themselves, with independent, critical judgment. There is an almost comical incongruity about much of what calls itself literary study today. The true subject in most literature classrooms is not literature, but literary scholarship.

As W. B. Stanford observes in Enemies of Poetry, many of those who are known as scholars of literature do not really concern themselves with literature at all, but "treat it as a branch of some subject that interests them more." There is nothing dastardly in treating literature as a fund of information about other things—human psychology, the historical uses of a language, what orthodox Marxists like to call the "representations" of material conditions, whatever—but this is not the same as treating it as literature. Although a theoretical defense of the idea would be out of place here, it remains a historical fact that some men and women have claimed (and other men and women have believed them) that literature may be undertaken for its own sake—with its own conventions, principles, standards, criteria, rules, and rule-like propositions—rather than for the sake of information about something else. In much contemporary thought this attitude tends to be associated with the Southern new critics, but in point of fact the philosophical claim for the autonomy of literature goes back as far as the Poetics, and even in the history of formal literary study in the United States it antedates the new criticism by a good third of a century. In 1907, in an introductory college textbook entitled The Appreciation of Literature, George E. Woodberry instructed his student readers that "It is useful to recognize at once the fact that literature is not an object of study, but a mode of pleasure; it is not a thing to be known merely like science, but to be lived." Woodberry was one of the first American poets to teach fulltime at a university. And though his terminology may not be very sharp, the distinction he is making seems clear enough. Here in an early champion of the literary teaching of literature is an explicit plea for a third way between literature as mere knowledge and literature as mere practice. Literature is a fusion of knowledge and practice; it is to be lived. And this is the conception that came to be formally installed in American colleges and universities under the name of creative writing.32

Although creative writing leads to the production of texts, it is not rhetoric. Although some of its graduates go on to get jobs, and some of these jobs are even in creative writing, its primary function is not economic. Although it is a form of literary study, it is not a form of literary scholarship. Creative writing is the concrete representation of an idea about the best way to teach literature. And if the idea is old, the representation is new. Nothing quite like it had ever been tried before. No other age and no other country have created an institution even remotely resembling the graduate writers’ workshop. Writers had been educated, and they had learned their lessons, but not in workshops. Despite the claims of some apologists, creative writing is not a more or less ancient "tradition" that brings honor to those who take it up. The poet Dave Smith says that creative writing’s

This is a ludicrous hodgepodge, having more to do with Smith’s yearning for custom and precedent than with anything that actually happened. The search for origins is a historical error, looking to establish the authority of current practices.34 It is an error that is repeated in more respectable form in Stephen Wilbers’s quasi-official history The Iowa Writers’ Workshop (1980). Wilbers argues that "the milieu from which the Workshop emerged was the tradition of the [amateur] writers’ clubs," the local reading-and-writing circles with names like Zetagathian, Erodelphian, and Hesperian, which flourished in Iowa City from the early 1890s to the second decade of the twentieth century. The so-called "workshop method" of gathering to read aloud and exchange views on work by members of the group is, Wilbers argues, a lineal descendant of the way in which the writers’ clubs conducted their meetings.35

I shall be suggesting a different source for the workshop method, but even if Wilbers were right about it the institution of the graduate writers’ workshop, at Iowa or elsewhere, would owe little else to the "tradition" of the writers’ clubs. Creative writing was not founded as a formal university discipline by a group of writers who wished to meet and discuss their writing. Nor does it owe its existence to rude fumbling after an institutional apparatus. Writing workshops may look like rhymers’ clubs or literary cliques, but the academic discipline is not defined by its mode of association; it is defined by its idea of literary education. Creative writing was devised as an explicit solution to an explicit problem. It was an effort to integrate literary knowledge with literary practice. And it was initiated at a specific time and place to combat a specific disintegration in the study of literature.

To make this argument is to fly in the face of settled opinion about creative writing’s origins. It is widely assumed that instruction in creative writing, in one form or another, is some-thing that cultures have always provided its young writers—although obviously under different names. Richard Hugo insists that

But creative writing is new. It didn’t weaken and drop from elementary and secondary education in the nineteenth century; while it did not receive its present name until the twentieth century, it was founded in the nineteenth. Even the expression "creative writing" is of nineteenth-century origin, although it was not used to designate a field of study until the twentieth. True, in the English-speaking world as elsewhere the study of poetry was once a requirement of every student’s education. And true, the study of poetry once included the writing of verses. But this study was part of a humanistic curriculum in which poetry had its place in a broader initiation in human self-understanding; it was not a special course in creative writing. "Make me a poet," Drayton remembers beseeching his schoolmaster at the age of ten; "doe it, if you can,/ And you shall see, Ile quickly be a man. . . ." And as Jonson says in drawing up his character of the ideal poet in the Discoveries, "[T]hat which we especially require in him is an exactness of study and multiplicity of reading, which maketh a full man." The aim of a humanistic education was to produce human beings, not poets. It wasn’t adverse to producing poets, but in the humanistic order of things one became a poet in order to become a more complete person, not the other way around.37

Despite an occasional lapse into humanistic slogans, the founders and early teachers of creative writing were less interested in making men than in remaking the literary curriculum. They were less troubled by the dropping of verse-writing in their day than by the dissemination of a false view of how verses are written. They wanted literature to be taught in a more literary manner—from within, from the standpoint of literary creation, from the view of the elephant. And so they sought to refasten a scholarly understanding of literature to the practical use of it, installing a curricular alternative to mere scholarship and mere practice. Although it suits the rhetorical purposes of latter-day apologists to declare that creative writing is age-old and recurrent, in truth it is quite new, an invention of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And the reason is quite simple. The modes of study to which creative writing was originally an alternative are also new, belonging to the same period of history. The story begins with the first of these.

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