Parini, Jay. "Literary Theory and the Writer." Colors of a Different Horse.

Parini believes that theory and practice have been torn apart, not just in creative writing, but in "American intellectual and culture life today ... more specifically, the "creative" writers -- poets and writers of fiction -- don't speak to the critics of literature, many of whom practice what is now called "theory." In some cases there is open warfare, with the writers disdainful of the jargon-ridden prose and outright philistinism of theory; for their part, the critics have less than no interest in the "texts" being woven right undr their very noses. To them, the only good poet is a dead poet" (127).

Parini believes that "once upon a time" the major creative writers were also major critics; he names Ben Jonson, John Dryden, Samuel Johnson, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, and T.S. Eliot among them. He believe that the tides turned "when criticism turned 'professional': "F.R. Leavis and Cleanth Brooks, two influential critics in the professional mode, were among the first important writers about poetry who were not themselves poets. A gap opened between imaginative and critical writing which has only widened" (127).

The "professional" New Critics seemed welcoming to authors; "the probelem with the New Criticism, of course, was its pretense to being apolitical. As Lionel Trilling wrote in Beyond Culture in 1968, 'We all want politics not to exist.' The supposed purpose of high art is to go beyond politics, to rise above the taint of ideology, to loft us thither into the ozone layer of aesthetic bliss, a place where all ironies and paradoxical motions of a given text are, at lest, harmonized" (128). Once again, the separation of writing seems to go between what is artistic or "other", and what can be readily explained, or at least theorized.