ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses John Berryman as a textual scholar and teacher of modernism in humanities courses. At Princeton University in 1945, Berryman accepted an invitation from James Laughlin to edit Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems for New Directions. After preparing this edition, Berrymandeveloped a humanities pedagogy that was Poundian in its comprehensiveness. In particular, his course called Humanities 54 at the University of Minnesota engaged the literary, cultural, and ethical complexity of modernism from a midcentury perspective. As a result, Berryman’s experiments in his humanities courses came to shape his reinvention of modernist discourse in The Dream Songs (1969).
