Creative

 I don't think my scholarship is less creative than my creative writing. I despise the term creative writing, partly for this reason. It is an academic term meant to shoehorn writing in a particular direction. Now, in writing programs they have the category of "creative non-fiction." But isn't literary criticism and scholarship creative non-fiction too? I would even go so far as to say that literary criticism is fictional: we create new narratives by weaving together our readings of fictional texts. No two narratives will be the same.  

This doesn't mean a literary critic should just go and write a bad novel or bad poetry. Plenty of us do, but I think the bad poetry by the poetry scholar might be bad because he is not a good scholar either. It could be the same failure of the imagination in both cases.