Super Schoolmaster: Ezra Pound as Teacher, Then and Now by Robert Scholes and David Ben-Merre

Abstract

Reviewed by: Super Schoolmaster: Ezra Pound as Teacher, Then and Now by Robert Scholes and David Ben-Merre K. Narayana Chandran Super Schoolmaster: Ezra Pound as Teacher, Then and Now. Robert Scholes and David Ben-Merre. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2021. Pp. 221. $32.95 (paper). Ezra Pound's compulsive streak as a teacher was so well-known that those who loved him and his fierce devotion to epic heritage, loved him most of all for his teaching. "He could not keep himself from teaching. In one way or another he was always teaching," concluded James Laughlin in his Pound as Wuz: Essays and Lectures on Ezra Pound.1 Given this, a monograph on "Ezra Pound as Teacher, Then and Now" was perhaps long overdue, and Robert Scholes and David Ben-Merre have given us one. As they tell us, "Super Schoolmaster" was what The Dial reviewer of Pound's Instigations (1920) had called him. That review noted Pound's insistence that good schooling led students to an enabling comparative perspective on the arts and literature of any country or period. Scholes and Ben-Merre urge us to reread Pound's miscellaneous prose at the present time, as we continue to worry about threats to humanities education the world over. While Pound always remained outside the academy as an unassimilable and aggressive stranger, he was wholly committed to reforming English pedagogy, hoping to bring about an American risorgimento in the arts in general—a project that he believed would be possible only by teaching young people how to read, and how to write. He was probably the first poet in English to insist on what we now call "cultural literacy" for readers who, according to him, would be better served by an understanding of what constitutes literary art, what socioeconomic factors determine the quality and affect of what one reads as literature. A keen learner and amateur theorist of socioeconomic compulsions that made his version of cultural literacy necessary in such books as How to Read, ABC of Economics, ABC of Reading, and Guide to Kulchur, Pound knew more than any one of his contemporaries how the literary marketplace made and unmade literary artists, and what struggles writers had to go through in getting noticed. As the authors of Super Schoolmaster note in their introduction, Pound's "unwavering advocacy for 'comparative' methods in education heralds the rise in academia of interdisciplinary programs and collaborative fields today" (4). In short, this short book harvests rich material evidence and bibliographical pointers to the fact that Pound was both willing to learn and always eager to share what he learnt by showing how American institutions of learning in his time shortchanged young minds, or neglected avid learners. The authors of this book combine the strengths of fair judgment and forthright criticism in the right measure. Scholes, who died in 2016 and did not live to see his book published, was himself a distinguished teacher and collaborator in modernist projects. As the author of such studies as Paradoxy of Modernism (2006) and Modernism in the Magazines (2010), students of modernism will know him as a pioneer of the Brown Modernist Journals Project (1995–2012) as well as for his distinguished work on English teachers and humanities classrooms in his Textual Power (1985) and The Rise and Fall of English (1998). In his short "Preface" to this book, Scholes remarks how influential Pound has been in shaping his own scholarly mission and pedagogic thinking. Ben-Merre's "Afterword" recalls how his tutelage under Scholes convinced him of the pedagogical imperative in aligning Pound, modernism, and higher education. That education alone, they both believe, will introduce young students to a world so different from the one in which they live, and think they know. Organized thematically, the five chapters of this book offer a decent pedagogic profile of Pound through fifty-odd years. Chapter one carries details of his early life as a disgruntled learner and teacher of English in American colleges. While Pound wanted to study, it would seem that he wanted to learn only what he chose and only on his terms. His difficulties had to do with the effeteness, as...