I don't think it's a good idea to generalize about how writers make a living. If too many writers have been teachers in recent decades, which may well be true, that's one thing. But to say that teaching or students inhibit creativity is like saying that medicine and patients inhibit creativity. It's just too imprecise, and I could spend a year listing all the ways in which it's inaccurate. Any sort of job has demands that interfere with the artist's freedom, and sometimes that's a good thing. When George Seferis complained to TS Eliot that he was working so hard he never had time to write, Eliot replied that he shouldn't panic. The unconscious was always at work, and when his real poems needed to be written (as opposed to mere exercises) they would force their way through. Though I envy full-time writers like Thomas Hardy, I'm aware that a number of my favorites had to hold down jobs that "interfered with their creativity." These include Frost, Auden (periodically),Eliot, Stevens, and more recently Wilbur, Hecht, Justice, and on and on....I keep remembering Flannery O'Conner's response to a question about whether the academy stifles writers. Well, she said, it doesn't stifle enough of them!
As for the statement that poetry should not go where it's not wanted--what balderdash! That leaves poetry in a pretty small ghetto, and it had damned well better break down those barriers or it will shrivel up and die of its own internal preciousness. Most people don't KNOW whether they want poetry or not. That's why we need good teachers to help them discover the art in a pleasureable way. We have to combat the prejudices of an ignorant world, my friend. We can't simply sit around holding each others hands and praising each other's creativity.
[This message has been edited by David Mason (edited January 10, 2002).]
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