For academics committed to the idea of an all-round aesthetic education, one of the great successes of the last thirty years has been the tremendous expansion of creative writing classes. Despite the dramatic expansion of creative writing as an academic discipline, the methods, ideals, and values of creative writing workshops have very often been at odds with the theoretical approaches to literature being taught by the rest of the literature department. The traditional workshop aims to foster participants' creative freedom so as to produce a well-formed piece of writing showing appropriate control of tone, style, and register. Unlike the traditional seminar, it does not usually ask students to analyze that writing in terms of its historical background, sociopolitical significance, or linguistic dynamics. The result has too often been an arts curriculum that is intellectually at odds with itself and that encourages double-think in its students. This article argues that the relation of creative writing to literary criticism is more than a territorial dispute within the English literature department because it goes to the core of what any kind of "creativity" means, and what an aesthetic education is meant to be. Surveying two recent attempts to cross this critical-creative divide by making "creative writing" part of a Cultural Studies program, the author maintains that understanding creativity as a function of social background actually makes some of its distinctive social function invisible. Moreover, the push to politicize or contextualize creative writing misrepresents the political aims of the literary theory it rejects, the ostensible formalism of the 1940s New Critics and their inspiration, T. S. Eliot. Their politics in turn can be traced back to Emerson, the inventor of the term "creative writing," and behind him to the foundational treatise of aesthetic education, Schiller's "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man," in which formal principles of free creativity are part of a political program for a united and freely democratic society. Paradoxically, however, it is Schiller's failure to make creative art realize his democratic project that may be most helpful in imagining how the gap between creative freedom and historical criticism might be bridged rather than widened. (Contains 45 notes.)