This article exemplifies the potential of wider applications of creative writing pedagogy to literary criticism. It considers Joseph Brodsky’s surviving creative assignments, used in his university seminars in the 1980s and 1990s, to demonstrate the relevance of the poet’s pedagogical approach to his creative method. It argues that the assignments reveal aspects of Brodsky’s private systematization behind his poetry, and demonstrates the impact of his instructions to students on the analysis of several poems, including both texts that visibly match specific descriptions offered in the assignments and texts that do not. The article demonstrates, through a series of close reading examples and a comprehensive table of the poet’s entire oeuvre structured in light of the assignments, that considering Brodsky’s poetic oeuvre through the lens of his pedagogy sheds new light on key aspects of the poet’s practice, evolution and bilingualism that have been otherwise inaccessible to researchers. Through this case study, a call is made for the study of the pedagogy of creative writers as an original and largely unexplored approach to literary criticism.