James Berger is a senior lecturer in American Studies and English at Yale University. He is the author of a number of books of scholarship and poetry, most recently The Meaning of Poems: Selected Poems (as) Poetics (Spuyten Duyvil, 2024). He is currently working on two books: “On Naive and Sentimental Poetics” (of which this essay will be a part) and “The Book of Impasses,” a frustrated investigation of our inability to imagine a future that is just and sustainable. (“What is now proved was once only imagined”).
Further work from Berger’s “On Naive and Sentimental Poetics” can be found on Jacket2 here.