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Charles Baudelaire, possibly the most influential author of nineteenth-century France, created a poetics of modernity and a thematics of the city; he transcended genre by moving between poetry and prose. He is also the most accessible of modern French poets to an American readership. These essays examine Baudelaire's poetics and the complex relationship between the poet and his twentieth-century literary heirs, including Rene Char, Yves Bonnefoy, and Michel Deguy.

The contributors, who include Deguy and Bonnefoy, are all distinguished writers or critics noted for their own poetry or for their scholarship on Baudelaire and in French studies. Their essays go to the heart of what makes Baudelaire so important: his modernity and his influence from the very beginning on other poets, including those outside of France. The essays are written in English, with citations from Baudelaire and other sources in both French and English.

Becoming What We Are is a collection of essays and reviews written in the last decade by the late Jude Dougherty, which covey a perspective on contemporary events and literature, written from a classical and Christian perspective. These essays convey a worldview much in need of restating when, according to Dougherty, Western society seems to have lost its bearings, in its legislative assemblies and in its judicial systems as well. Dougherty writes as a philosopher, specifically as one who has devoted most of his life to the study of metaphysics. In these pages Dougherty examines the Jacobians, the empirical world of Hume, Locke and Hobbes, and Kant, the metaphysics of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and Aquinas that opens one to God and provides on with a moral compass, and critiques the work of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and John Dewey. Becoming What We Are spends some time inquiring into the character of a few great men viz. George Washington, Charles De Gaulle and Moses Maimonides. Dougherty draws upon and shows respect for numerous contemporary authors who are engaged in research and analysis similar to his. The intent is, with the aid of others to restate some ancient but neglected truths. But more than that to show that true science is possible, that nature and human nature yield to human enquiry, that science is not to be confused with description and prediction.