Like the first classes in English composition, the first classes in Creative Writing were a reaction against the study of literature as most universities practiced it before 1900. After the CivilWar, study in the Classics began to be supplanted by the study of philology. Philology was an effort to make literature the subject of a linguistic science; philology sought to define and anatomize literary works for intimations of a culture's meaning and order. Although philology opened academic study to literary works in English, and not just those in Greek and Latin, philology became specialized and limited. With each passing decade, it became more divisive as well.

The founder of The American Journal of Philology, Basil Gildersleeve of Johns Hopkins University, codified the practices of ‘historico-philological science,’ as he called it. His pronouncements illustrate a rift in academe that remains with us today. Professor Gildersleeve, in the 1920s, divided the study of literature into two camps: the scholars versus the aesthetes – the philologists versus the littérateurs. Gildersleeve likened the philologists to botanists; these were the real men of letters, scholars who defined, classified, annotated, and conserved literary wisdom. Those who were interested in studying a poem's music or a novel's aesthetic form – the mere littérateurs – Gildersleeve likened to florists.

The phrase ‘creative writing’ was, perhaps, first coined by Emerson in 1837. In his Phi Beta Kappa address ‘The American Scholar,’ Emerson referred to ‘creative writing’ and ‘creative reading’ as respites from ‘the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees.’ The advocate of a new culture for a new nation, Emerson became a famous detractor of received bodies of knowledge. For Emerson, America’s enabling spirit was in its proclivity to add, to test, to revolt, and to innovate. Philology, as it was usually practiced and taught, thwarted these New World tendencies in an effort to conserve the past. Emily Dickinson, too, would write a poem (‘Shall I take thee, the Poet said’) that – obliquely, of course – criticizes philology for being spiritually inept.