Time for Baudelaire suggests it’s time that Yale French Studies devote an issue to the poet who more than any other inaugurated the unfinished epoch of modernity. It also urges that we take or make time for thinking about the specific ways in which poetry—and perhaps poetry alone—allows a historical concept like modernity to become accessible in the first place. Finally, it asks what time means when it comes to reading the relation between Baudelaire’s writings and the moment, the event, the era—and our capacity to experience them together or in isolation from one another.
