ABSTRACT
The alliterative bond of ‘criticism’ and ‘creativity’ is a happy one; for they are part of the same process, part of the ‘speaking circuit’ through which language in general, as a social and psychological phenomenon, becomes charged with precise human significance. This chapter considers critical poems and literary drafts establish the integral connection between criticism and creativity, providing a basis for views that criticism can be much more than just explication. Criticism is a kind of debt repaid by reader to writer, an effort to enlist more admirers for a writer the critic admires, and as such should be coloured by the process of literary discovery which is analogous to the original act of creation. In the critical poems - and they are chosen almost arbitrarily from many possible examples - criticism and creativity merge in their central concern with literature as creative relationship rather than either escapism or didacticism.
