The Princeton Alumni Weekly of March 8 published an article by Mr. Allen Tate describing his way of handling the Creative Arts Program for the Princeton student writers, who are under his direction. Of course Mr. Tate is not the ordinary university professor. He has generally had his own vocation as an actual creative writer and critic, and only very occasionally the kind of official connection with literature that goes with teaching in a university. Everybody knows of a certain opposition between the literary attitudes which develop under these two conditions; it may not be a necessary one, but it is usual, and invites serious discussion.
Mr. Tate considers modestly, or it may be in strict logical propriety, that it is not within his power really to teach his young men how to write. The practicable thing, as he sees it, is to teach them how to read, and thereby, and only indirectly, how to write. To this end he and his writers spend most of their first year together in reading fine literature and talking about it, with the result that as the year goes on some writing begins to come in, but spontaneously, not under compulsion. There is enough of it presently for everybody concerned to see whether a given man has in him the turn for writing, and is justified in going on.
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