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 learnt in universities, how these poets needed universities, and how universities needed them. Gail McDonald examines crucial uncollected essays as well as Pound's and Eliot's more familiar works 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 that resulted in a curious doubleness within high modernist aesthetics and American educational philosophy, a doubleness echoed in the contradictions of Pound's and Eliot's poetry. In addition to new readings of Pound and Eliot, this book offers 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.