In the days when people who were educated at all learned Latin, students just did the translations. One of the interesting things about the Renaissance in general and in particular in England was that a lot of the Greek manuscripts were only rediscovered in the West at a time when education for nation states was more critical (more correspondence, more record-keeping, for larger political entities). So a lot of people were trained this way -- and not all of them became creative writers, but the per capita numbers were huge.

It's just not that common these days. I'll probably do translations if I end up in Nicaragua, but it won't be the same as if I started learning a foreign language in grade school.

When I was a high school poet, I was very interested in formal verse -- one of the books I had was a prosody book. Most creative writing teachers never went there (though Judith Sherwin and Kenneth Koch, in a idiosyncratic way in Koch's case, did. When I taught creative writing, I taught strategies, including formal verse.

My very first creative writing teacher, in high school, assigned imitations of Hemingway, Henry James, Salinger, for fiction, but was all loosey goosey about the poetry, didn't like formal verse.

Most people write avocationally, even some people who are in commercial print. :)

What's cool about this is that it's outside the whole MFA industry (someone I've talked to recently said the universities would probably figure out a way to give MFAs in this, too). MFA programs in general tend to produce people who are hysterically concerned about publishing, not in finding or building a real audience for what they're doing.

And fan fic writers are willing to use their own writing to become better readers of the text they're riffing off of, not as the goal of an MFA program that confuses its needs for full classes with student needs. Nobody goes into an MFA program just to become a better reader.

I'm not sure I completely get it, but it's fun to watch.