In 1903, the university began to embrace the discipline of creative writing—a separate and distinct area of expertise from social practice writing such as journalism and basic proficiency in language. According to D. G. Myers, whose book Elephants Teach is the first published history of creative writing, writing as art built upon social practice writing’s rise in the university and attached itself to the cause of criticism and theory which set its sights on reforming English Studies in general.

This creeping commercialization of the creative, together with the shift from criticism existing in the public realm to criticism existing in the academy, directly influenced the rise of creative writing programs in the United States. Emerging from the goal of reforming and redefining the academic study of literature through creative engagement with texts rather than through mere historical or linguistic analysis, such programs were seen as the legitimization of the writer-artists’ role in society. In Paul Dawson’s history of the rise of creative writing programs, Creative Writing and the New Humanities, this British dude Walter Besant is quoted as having argued, “fiction, like painting, sculpture etc. should be considered an art and the novelists’ craft should be taught at university because it would increase the professional and social standing of writers.” Besant, desiring a new respect for the role of writing in society, lifted the romance from the writer’s iconic garret and led to self-described wild writers seeking solace from their academic disaffections in the cozy pages of the New York Times Magazine. Go figure.

Workshops, working by class consensus, drive the ‘creative’ writer to write to please the teacher and peers—an audience judging literary production under a rubric instructed through studies in criticism and the material reality of their similar academic and social experiences. Workshopping thus operates negatively; by avoiding certain styles, creative writing instructs the developing writer how not to write while still faux-striving to encourage the writer to develop his own unique voice.  Such programs still universally posit that writing cannot be taught, utilizing the idea that while the poet is born and not made, his innate talents can be nurtured and developed.

As literary work is produced in programs like these, questions regarding the value of this work as appreciated by a non-similarly educated audience come into play. Creative Writing written for a consumer audience, the vast majority of literature produced outside of the academy, would likely be derided as pop-lit and the sort of Dan Brown-esque claptrap all good pretentious folk love to loath. Yet, creative writing written for a professional audiences providing paid readings, prizes, access to publishing houses and tenure-track positions in the academy has also been blamed for the ‘death of poetry.’ Literature today, whether produced for consumer or professional interests, falls short in bridging the gap between intellectual thought and the public appeal that once characterized writing meant to inspire and move flesh and blood into passionate contortion.

In The American Scholar, Ralph Waldo Emerson posited the need for “creative reading as well as creative writing” to combat the increasing forces of rote, analytically sound yet intellectually uninspired learning he observed across the country. Deriving their name from this address, creative writing programs originally envisioned a way of seeing literature as the process by which man collectively mused towards a better society. Similarly, the ideal of the public intellectual as steward of societal thought came into being out of the decline in public intellectual life and the dearth of independent thinkers operating as freelance writers outside of the academy throughout the mid-to-late twentieth century. The expansion of suburbia, the gentrification of bohemia and the rise of universities captured the generation of intellectuals who came of age in the 1960s and formed the New Left who, unable to conceive of an academic life outside of the university, became radicalized professors writing for restricted professional audiences in exclusionary jargon.

All in all, the state of the ship as present resembles a Lego factory churning out those annoying pieces that only fit with that stupid Star Wars promotional set that costs too much for anybody to really care about or afford. Baby baby, the Death Star is sinking and we’re all out of z-bars – we respect your precision, but all we really want is more castles, dragons and the occasional princess palace for those of us fond of heart.