This essay considers an essential act of seeing that is central to the composing process—a conceptual moment when the mind acquires a notional sense of what the accumulated evidence means. Yet this necessary conceptual thing cannot actually be seen in any ordinary sense of the word. Imaginal rather than pictorial, the conception is crucial to the effective teaching of writing. Without it there is no hint of idea, no basis for a coherent argument. Without it, student writers remain blinded by the evidence.

What follows is an essay-as-speech, offered as a direct response to a weekend of freewriting at Bard College enacted under the direction of skilled practitioners of Peter Elbow's principles of writing and thinking. Elbow, in attendance, gave the keynote address. This essay-as-speech both critiques the practices enacted at Bard and offers a very different way of teaching writing, one that honors the epistemological underpinnings of Elbow's work while outlining a pedagogy founded on constraints and images.

Having come of age before poststructuralism got its toehold on the university, I had the pleasure of discovering uncertainty at my own pace. Even as late as 1967 at the University of Pennsylvania, the war in Vietnam and the one on Philadelphia's streets had done little to disturb the work going on inside our classrooms where eminent literary historians were still trying to hold their own against the new critics. Yet even then, something else was in the offing. Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism-required reading in our proseminar for new graduate students-provided a strange counterpoint to the close readings we were struggling with in other classes under the influence of faculty subversives. Abandoning the particularity of a given poem to meet the anagogic Frye on loftier heights left us breathless, but we were certain, despite our exhaustion and exhilaration, that Frye's more theoretical speculations were not our main business. Neither were historical schemes that omitted the reading of literature. Our main business was the poem itself. Despite what people say now, it never occurred to us back then that we could get our reading of a given poem exactly right, or that there was only one reading, or that everything we needed to know was there in the poem. We did know, however, that some readings were better than others because they accounted for more of what was there. Our readings had an inherent obligation in them to account for a poem's beauty and to consider that beauty as a way of speculating about the poem's meaning. We acknowledged a hierarchy of value and had a yen for aesthetic pleasures. We were not troubled that we knew too