Poetry of Abraham Lincoln - "The Suicide's Soliloquy"

"The Suicide's Soliloquy"

One of the more interesting poems attributed to Lincoln is “The Suicide's Soliloquy.” It was found in the August 25, 1838 issue of the Sangamo Journal of Springfield, Illinois by Richard Lawrence Miller in 1997. After studying the text and concluding that the poem was composed by Lincoln, he announced his discovery in a 2004 newsletter of the Abraham Lincoln Association. Lincoln scholars are still split on the authenticity of the poem. The poem is in the form of a suicide note, written by a man about to kill himself on the banks of the Sangamo River. Lincoln’s well known depression gives some scholars cause to believe that he would write such a poem, even if he had no intentions of suicide of his own. Miller states that the poem fits the meter, syntax, diction, and tone of Lincoln’s other works.

Lincoln had expressed suicidal thoughts to his friend Joshua Speed on two separate occasions at the ages of twenty-six and thirty-one. Speed had told Lincoln’s biographer, William Herndon, that Lincoln had published a poem in 1838. Going off information from Herndon’s research, it was concluded that the poem was published in the summer of 1841, coinciding with the time of Lincoln’s “fatal first of January” breakdown. Thus scholars had been unable to locate it.