Learning to be Modern: Pound, Eliot, and the American University

It is axiomatic that the poetry of high modernism was composed by the educated for the educated. Learning to be Modern explores American educational history as a context of this commonplace: what Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot learned in universities, how these poets needed universities, and how universities needed them. McDonald examines crucial unpublished essays as well as more familiar works by Pound and Eliot on educational topics. She also reveals the vast amount of time they devoted to pedagogical concerns, emulating and assisting the American academy's evolution from nineteenth-century religious college to twentieth-century research university. This process demanded a continuous calibration of the relationship between tradition and innovation which resulted in a curious doubleness within high modernist aesthetics and American educational philosophy--a doubleness which is echoed in the contradictions of poetry by Pound and Eliot. In addition to new readings of Pound and Eliot, this book presents a fresh way of thinking about high modernist literature at large and, in its examination of turn-of-the-century debates on educational progressivism, provides a historical context for current debates about the function of universities and the shape of the literary canon.