The Flower Papers

Abstract

Unless the reader subscribed to Three Rivers Review in the year 1956 and can recall in the third issue a little poem about a girl, he probably has never heard of the poet Henry Flower. The name seldom evokes a critic's footnote, a scholarly nod, or a flurry in the bookstores. It is far from my ambitions as editor to distinguish this man among men of letters on the merits of a single published poem. Many will have their doubts that Mr. Flower deserves any serious literary consideration whatever; some will call him the fiction of an insidious literary prankster, a modern MacPherson. I have taken on this task in the hope of proving to the latter group of Thomases that Henry Flower did indeed exist. In deed and in word, exist.