Title: Benjamin O. Flower to Walt Whitman, 2 December 1890
Date: December 2, 1890
Whitman Archive ID: loc.02082
Source: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Transcribed from digital images or a microfilm reproduction of the original item. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
Editorial note: The annotation, "see notes Dec. 3, '90," is in the hand of Horace Traubel.
Contributors to digital file: Ethan Heusser, Cristin Noonan, Andrew David King, Brandon James O'Neil, and Stephanie Blalock
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OFFICE OF
THE ARENA PUBLISHING
EXPONENT OF MODERN THOUGHT
EDITED BY B.O. FLOWER
PER.ANNUM $5
SINGLE COPIES .50
PIERCE BLD'G COPLEY SQ.
BOSTON.
Dec. 2 1890.
Walt Whitman,
Camden, NJ.
My dear Sir:
Your esteemed favor containing poems submitted for the Arena received;—and in reply would say that I do not find the poems available at the present time. I should much prefer an essay from your pen to poems, as at the present time I have all the poems I can possibly use for some time to come.
Cordially yours,
B.O. Flower
Correspondent:
Benjamin Orange Flower
(1858–1918) was an American journalist and reform writer. Born in Illinois
to Rev. Alfred Flower (1822–1907) and Elizabeth Orange (1821–1896),
Flower studied for a few years at Transylvania University in Lexington,
Kentucky, in hopes of pursuing a religious vocation like his father. Flower left
university after a change of religion and took up journalism, founding The American Spectator in 1886, a magazine succeeded by
The Arena three years later. The magazine advocated
social reform movements including socialism, prohibition, and trade unionism,
and published work from authors Stephen Crane, Hamiln Garland, and Upton
Sinclair. After The Arena ceased publication in 1909,
Flower began the Twentieth-Century Magazine that ran
until 1911. His essays from The Arena were gathered in
several volumes, including Civilization's Inferno; or, Studies
in the Social Cellar (Boston: Arena Publishing Co., 1893) and Persons, Places and Ideas: Miscellaneous Essays (Boston:
Arena Publishing Co., 1896). He is also author of Christian
Science as a Religious Belief and a Therapeutic Agent (Boston:
Twentieth Century Co., 1910) and Progressive Men, Women, and
Movements of the Past Twenty-Five Years (Boston: The Arena, 1914). For
more information, see Allen J. Matusow, "The Mind of B. O. Flower," The New England Quarterly 34.4 (December 1961),
492–509.