creative.web.net

   Creative Youth: Or How a School Environment Set Free the Creative Spirit was published in 1925 by the school teacher Hughes Mearns. 

   It was an anthology of student poems resulting from a 'five year experiment in creative writing' (1925:9) with children at the Lincoln School of Teachers' College, Columbia University.  According to Myers, it was in this book that 'the phrase "creative writing" was used for the first time to refer to a course of study.  It was not called creative writing until Mearns called it creative writing.  And then it was rarely called anything else' (1996:103).1  This anthology also included a long introduction outlining the pedagogical process by which the poems were produced.  The artist, Mearns insists in this introduction, is someone who 'refuses to give up his gift of seeing and thinking and feeling as a child' (1925:70), while 'children speak naturally in a form that we adults are accustomed to call poetry; and without any searching for appropriate use of the medium' (65).  What links the child and the artist is the idea that 'Literature is simply unique self-expression,' a practice of individuation which most adults give up when they adapt and conform to social conventions.

   Mearns opens Creative Youth by telling us that the poems collected here have been acknowledged by critics as possessing real aesthetic merit; and the very fact that they are collected for public consumption encourages us to marvel at the creative achievements of the students.  'We are not primarily interested in making poets or even in making writers,' he nonetheless claims; 'our purpose has been simply to set up such an environment as might extend further the possibilities in creative writing of pupils of high-school age.'  But what is the point of this?  For Mearns, 'the best literary education comes with the amplest self-realization of the individual at whatever age he happens to be.'  Writing is a device not for the practical use of communication, but for setting free the 'creative spirit' of the child.  Thus employed, it is more likely to assume 'literary' form.
   
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   In Creative Youth Mearns explains that the environment created for his students at the Lincoln School 'is the result of a philosophy of education which...is not yet ready to set limits to a pupil's achievement at any stage of his growth, which believes that education is not put on like stucco on a wall, but comes primarily from within, which receives without question any sincere product, nor intrudes at every stage of growth with too severe or too unnatural standard of perfection.'  

From Google Books: Creative Writing and the New Humanities by Paul Dawson, page 52-54.

 ...and here is a discussion of Creative Writing and Personal Experience:

Creative writing was for very specific reasons from its very inception wound-up with concerns of individuated experience. The first to teach it by name was William Hughes Mearns (1875-1965). ²⁰   Creative writing's goal, as understood by Mearns and the entire generation of progressivist educators he influenced, was more "self-realization" or "creative growth" than the crafting of a fine poem or short story. Mearns' interest was with "self-expression as a means of growth, and not of poetry....The business of making professional poets [indeed, few had yet been made] is still another matter -- with which this writer has never had the least interest." ²¹  

       Mearns' experiments at Lincoln School, under the auspices of Columbia University and John Dewey, lit a fuse under the nation after the publication of his two books on the teaching of creative writing, Creative Youth and Creative Power, in 1925 and 1929. His first book caused such waves in secondary schooling, and the adoption of his methods was so precipitous, that by 1929 the New York City school board had hired a Dr. Blanche F. Weekes to determine why elementary students were shying from "serious poetry," and it was determined "there is over-emphasis on nature poetry and that greater consideration should be given by teachers to themes more in harmony with the child's probable experience." The projects adopted by school boards around the nation concerning both the reading and writing of poetry were predicated on the "child's...experience." This idea sold so well to the public that by 1938 Christina Johnson could write in the English Journal that the writing of poetry in fact leads to "selfhood" and "personal identity." ²³   Mearns said, astonished, "[w]ith characteristic hustle America has suddenly adopted 'creative work.'" ²⁴   Indeed, by 1930, roughly forty-five percent of American colleges possessed at least one creative writing course, and many of these offered two or three courses in different genres. ²⁵   To this day the personal experience of the writer has been so foregrounded that the writer William Gass prefers not to teach courses in creative writing because, as he puts it, "I hate dealing with people's souls." ²⁶   Richard Hugo (1923-1982) was more amenable to this new turn toward personal experience in the academy. A member of the University of Montana's English Department from 1964 to his death in 1982, he spoke often and favorably of creative writing programs as centers of personal refuge. Their current flyer for the creative writing program still quotes Hugo on this matter: "a creative writing class may be one of the last places where you can go where your life still matters." ²⁷  

       What lay behind Mearns' missionary zeal about creative writing was his assumption that we are each an isolato, that each student was sequestered in his own life. It was his contention -- indeed, religion -- that creative writing was a technique by which experience could be conveyed from individual to individual: Mearns called it simply the "transfer of experience." Because each student was so fundamentally isolated, his only recourse when writing was to delve into himself:

"'I can't tell you what you should write about,' is the commonest approach to a new pupil, 'because I don't know what you know; but I could tell you what I want to write about myself.' Then follows a vivid picturing of recent and remote experience, so personal that no one else would dream of using the material. 'That's the sort of experience I am having, but, of course, you wouldn't know enough about that. Now you -- what sort of experience have you been having? What do you think about most of the time?'" ²⁸  

       And so on. Just as Dewey envisioned the role of art in general as a medium by which experience could be shared between individuals, Mearns felt that creative writing in particular was an especially efficient means of effecting this transfer. ²⁹   The import of Mearns' ideas about isolated experience were so influential that in 1993, Adrienne Rich (b. 1929) -- herself the product of a Mearnsian classroom at Radcliffe -- could write, "[w]e ... go to poetry to receive the experience of the not me, enter a field of vision we could not otherwise apprehend." ³⁰  

       The influence of the Mearnsian doctrine that poetry reflect a writer's experience has so permeated contemporary American poetics that readers will often brook no violation of its tenets. A July 1996 article in the APR tried the limits of these tenets by announcing to the world the arrival of Japanese-born (albeit deceased) poet, Araki Yasusada, an alleged survivor of Hiroshima, whose "fourteen spiral bound notebooks" were found by his son. When the subject of the coverage in the recent APR "special supplement" "Introducing Araki Yasusada" was shown to be a "hoax," a healthy degree of outrage was levelled at the perpetrator. ³¹   The accused prankster, some have argued, apparently created this fictional poet while writing his doctoral dissertation at Bowling Green State University. Kent Johnson, the man to whom many point as the author, quite rightly insists the word "hoax" does no justice to the work itself, insofar as the term limits the cultural, aesthetic, and political scope of the Yasusada manuscripts. The interesting thing about the most vituperative of the criticisms levelled against whoever wrote the work isn't so much that bad poetry had been traded against an exotic biography (a biography which in turn proved to be false) -- the poetry, it is generally agreed, is good -- nor was it so much that Yasusada's nonexistence proved to be in bad taste (having been billed as a survivor of Hiroshima). The outrage, I think, arose in large measure because Yasusada's creator had broken the primary tenet of our mainstream Mearnsian milieu: that a poet's work portray his experience. In an era of isolation, we cannot afford counterfeiters. ³²  

 This is from a website at: http://www.flashpointmag.com/guddin~1.htm 

and it is entitled: 

From Petit to Langpo:

A History of Solipsism and Experience In Mainstream American Poetics Since the Rise of Creative Writing

by Gabriel Gudding

 Flash Point Mag is an online magazine about culture and civilization that deals with "fiction, essays, poetry, politics and art."  Unfortunately, I have not been able to find a picture or photo of Mearns.