“It doesn’t . . . matter where you begin”: Pound and Santayana on Education

I. Introduction

American poet Ezra Pound wrote a letter on February 6, 1940, inviting American philosopher George Santayana to join poet T. S. Eliot and himself in writing “a volume . . . on the Ideal University, or The Proper Curriculum, or how it would be possible to educate and/or (mostly or) civilize the university stewd-dent.”¹ Santayana declined the invitation and claimed to have no ideas on the subject of education. Participation would have been morally impossible, he wrote, because unlike Pound and Eliot, whom he regarded as “reformers, full of prophetic zeal and faith in the Advent of the Lord,” Santayana was “cynically content to let people educate or neglect themselves as they may prefer.”²

This supports the approach of commentators who emphasize the differences between Pound and Santayana. Anthony Woodward has emphasized the “deep gap . . . between their temperaments.”³ Santayana’s biographer, John McCormick, has emphasized Pound’s lifelong misapprehension of Santayana, a position that seems seconded by Pound scholar Noel Stock.⁴

Pound and Santayana were temperamentally quite distinct, but this does not justify neglect of common concerns and possible similarities. I propose to take seriously Pound’s invitation to Santayana and to trust Pound’s sense that Santayana may have something to say about education. In this speculative, rather than historical, essay, I want to read Santayana with an eye to what conceivably could have appealed to Pound. I want to use Pound’s views as a stalking horse to track ideas on education in Santayana’s thought.⁵ I hope to suggest deeper connections between the two thinkers than have previously been noted⁶ and to consider how their responses to shared concerns can benefit a reader concerned with pedagogy.

II. Pound’s Aims of Education

For Pound education should broaden one’s connections to the natural and social worlds,⁷ as well as connections among ideas. Establishing such connections is central to human vitality, and it is the teacher’s mission to maintain this vitality or health of the mind.⁸ Such health thrives in the clarity and vigor of language, which Pound called “the health of the very matter of thought itself.” When language becomes “slushy and inexact,” both society and the individual suffer, and culture declines.⁹ Education amounts to learning how to read and write because, according to Pound, “the purpose of writing is to reveal the subject,”¹⁰ to reveal the concrete thing instead of a disconnected abstraction. Corrupt writing deceives and conceals, and education as health “consists,” wrote Pound, “in ‘getting wise’ in the rawest and hardest boiled sense of that bit of argot.”¹¹

But education is not merely evading deception; it is “active, instant and present awareness,”¹² an understanding of process rather than merely retaining information. This awareness can tell the difference between a painting by Goya and one by Velázquez and does not merely memorize a list of names and dates from an encyclopedia. It distinguishes between live ideas and dead ones.

Distinguishing live ideas is important if one aims to “get hold of ideas, in the sense that [one] will know where they ‘weigh in.’”¹³ Grasping ideas and sensing their heft enables one to wield them as one makes one’s way through the world, and real knowledge is a way of living rather than a collection of information: it informs perception and directs one’s relations to the world.¹⁴ This is the way to really do and make things. Education is creative, and the aim of learning is to make it new.¹⁵

But why enlist Santayana? Pound wrote in his letter to Santayana that the idea for a book was prompted by Santayana’s anecdote about Henry Adams. According to Santayana’s autobiography (published in the years after his correspondence with Pound), Adams said to Santayana, “So you are trying to teach philosophy at Harvard. . . . I once tried to teach history there, but it can’t be done. It isn’t really possible to teach anything.”¹⁶ Pound believed that Santayana further remarked, “It doesn’t matter what so long...