Super Schoolmaster

David Ben-Merre, Robert Scholes

Description

Once described by T. S. Eliot as "first and foremost, a teacher and campaigner," Ezra Pound has received no shortage of critical attention. Super Schoolmaster suggests that Pound still has quite a bit to teach readers in the twenty-first century, particularly amid increasing threats to the humanities and higher education. Robert Scholes and David Ben-Merre illuminate Pound's contradictory career of innovative poetics and reactionary politics by following his extensive thinking about teaching and learning within and beyond the academy. Given how scornful Pound could be of institutionalized schooling, the book's title may feel like a misnomer; however, Super Schoolmaster makes clear how wholeheartedly this modernist icon believed in the importance and vitality of learning. Pound's brief flirtation with becoming a professional academic ended early on, but his entire life's work can be seen as an immense pedagogical lesson, promoting a living, breathing culture tied to the very fabric of contemporary life. Not to ignore his critics, who have taught the necessity of reading against Pound, Scholes and Ben-Merre propose that to reread Pound now is to celebrate the joy of learning while always remaining mindful of the ultimate perils of his example.
Acknowledgments

Preface: Back to Basics
Robert Scholes

Preface: In a Station
David Ben-Merre

Introduction

1. Pounding the Academy: The Poet as Student and Teacher

2. The Critic as Teacher: Pound's "New Method" in Scholarship

3. How to Read Comparatively

4. Periodical Studies

5. The Instructor as Propagandist

Afterword: Schools of Fish
David Ben-Merre

Notes
Works Cited
Index

Sujets

• États-Unis
• Tertiary education
• United States of America
• USA

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781438481487
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 11 Mo

Extrait

SUPER SCHOOLMASTER
SUPER SCHOOLMASTER
EZRA POUND AS TEACHER, THEN AND NOW
Robert Scholes and David Ben-Merre
Cover image from Ezra Pound’s “Announcements” from “The Egoist,” November 1914.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2021 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Scholes, Robert, author. | Ben-Merre, David, author.
Title: Super schoolmaster : Ezra Pound as teacher, then and now. / Robert Scholes, author | David Ben-Merre, author.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438481470 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438481487 (ebook)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Jo Ann (of course)
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface: Back to Basics
Robert Scholes
Preface: In a Station
David Ben-Merre
Introduction
Chapter 1 Pounding the Academy: The Poet as Student and Teacher
Chapter 2 The Critic as Teacher: Pound’s “New Method” in Scholarship
Chapter 3 How to Read Comparatively
Chapter 4 Periodical Studies
Chapter 5 The Instructor as Propagandist
Afterword: Schools of Fish
David Ben-Merre
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
We are tremendously grateful to Carl Klaus and Sean Latham for their encouragement at all stages of this project, and Clifford Wulfman for his generosity in allowing us to reimagine and amplify a chapter from his and Bob’s groundbreaking Modernism in the Magazines (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). We offer a very special thanks to our editor Rebecca Colesworthy, who was also a student of Bob’s. Sadly, Bob passed away before she became involved in this project, but he would have been so delighted by this serendipitous turn and ever so thankful—as am I—for her constant help and unrelenting stewardship. To the entire community of Bob’s students (from both inside and outside the classroom) and to all those who continually think and rethink the possibilities of modernism—thank you.
Preface
Back to Basics
Waaal, frankly, I allus thought it would be a good thing to come back and put some sort of a college or university into shape to teach the young something. Not merely the god damn saw dust and substitutes for learnin’ and literature they got handed.
—Doob 9–10
S o said Ezra Pound in one of his infamous radio broadcasts to the United States during the Second World War—this one dated October 26, 1941, weeks before the United States would enter the war. Even though the contexts of many of his teachings from these years were horribly wrong, I am inclined to believe him and take what he said quite literally. He had been thinking along these lines, and even acting along them, for more than thirty years when he wrote those words and spoke them.
This book began with the faith that there is more to the story of Pound as a teacher than his informal pontificating in Italy. My thoughts were confirmed by the recently published volume of letters from Pound to his parents (excellently edited by A. David Moody, Joanna Moody, and Mary de Rachewiltz) in which his persistent attempts to get academic employment and recognition are fully visible for the first time. 1 These letters might make us reconsider substantial portions of his published work as demonstrations of his pedagogical skill and scholarly strength. My thoughts continued in this direction by contemplating Pound’s essay “Small Magazines,” which appeared in the English Journal for November 1930 (though I did not read it until a bit later). This periodical was then, and still is, the voice of the National Council of Teachers of English.
There are reasons why modernist literature in English made such an impact on the academy, and they are grounded in the academic training of the masters of that literature. T. S. Eliot—that other American academic poet—wrote his dissertation in philosophy, while James Joyce specialized, like Pound, in Romance languages, though he ended up teaching English in a Berlitz school and giving public lectures in Italian on Shakespeare, Defoe, and Blake. Dora Marsden, the founding editor of The Freewoman magazine and its successors, had an academic degree and always appeared on the masthead of her magazines as “Dora Marsden, B.A.” Virginia Woolf thought and wrote frequently about the way women were disadvantaged in the British educational system, but she, too, taught courses and wrote in an educational mode regularly.
For his part, Pound actually did go to graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania and then got a teaching job at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana. As we learn from his letters to his parents, Pound was not an English teacher but rather the entire (newly established) Department of Romance Languages, teaching French to fifth-seven students, Spanish to thirty, and handling another fifteen in advanced French ( EPtP 57). Pound’s career in Crawfordsville was terminated abruptly after he befriended two theatrical women who were stranded there—the first a male impersonator, and the second a refugee from a burlesque show (though reports about the incidents differ). This was the final straw for the Wabash administration, and Pound was forced to resign and abandon his formal teaching career. He did think of himself as a teacher, however, for most of his life, even though he never received the PhD he thought he deserved. From his earliest days in college Pound had sought degrees for learning what he wanted to learn rather than for fulfilling some set of requirements that did not interest him. To the extent that much of his poetry has a distinct scholarly quality and his scholarship is exceptionally lively and creative, he was able to bridge an important gap between the scholar and the poet. And importantly for him, both poetry and scholarship became a means of teaching. The poetry, of course, has been examined extensively—and intensively, too—but the pedagogical Pound can stand a bit more examination.
While it is hard to miss how didactic Pound can be, we are seldom aware of just how educational his purpose is. I remember James Laughlin, the founder of the New Directions Press, once telling me that he got into publishing after visiting Pound in Rapallo, which he referred to as attending the “Ezuversity.” And he was neither the first nor the last to study in that school. In a sense, Pound’s entire career can be seen as one great pedagogical lesson. In a letter to Laughlin, he noted:
Just opened ABC Reading. as practical assset to the Jas / consider the number of yung who hv / said that they hv / learned MORE from sd / book than all their schooling. What about drive by STATES to git it into curriCUlumz / even with bait of cheaper reprint. … (qtd. in Gordon 216)
Written most likely in 1951, Pound’s letter shows the poet’s faith in his own abilities as a teacher. While his desire to instruct others never wavered, his methods of doing so did. Those changes are notable even in the few years between the publications of How to Read (1931) and ABC of Reading (1934), which is very much a revision and extension of the first book with a short anthology set of “Exhibits” included. It is also very specifically designed as a primer: “The present pages should be impersonal enough to serve as a text-book. The author hopes … to produce a text book that can also be read ‘for pleasure as well as profit’ by those who are no longer in school; by those who have not been to school; or by those who in their college days suffered those things which most of my own generation suffered” (11). Pound, of course, had refused to suffer those things and had carved out his own program in comparative literature as a student, defying the English Department at Penn to do so, after getting just what he wanted from Hamilton College. In his introductory note, however, he also has encouraging words for “teachers and professors,” saying that he is not trying to make their lives more difficult but “should like to make even their lot and life more exhilarating and to save even them from unnecessary boredom in the class-room” (11). Pound correctly diagnosed one of the major problems with delegating education. Teachers, often overworked, become just as exhausted as their overworked students, uninterested in their own topics and left without any motivation for discovering what is new.
By insisting that his was a textbook, addressed both to students and teachers, Pound was also clearly trying to promote sales. And, over time, this worked pretty well. The book was first published by George Routledge Sons in London, and the first American publisher was the Yale University Press. There were 2,000 copies printed in England and another thousand in the United States. In 1951, Faber and Faber in England printed 2,670 copies and sent sheets for 3,500 more to New Dire