OxBlog

Wednesday, June 09, 2004

# Posted 7:07 AM by Patrick Belton  

PRESIDENTIAL HISTORIAN RICHARD MILLER HAS UNEARTHED a long speculated-about suicide poem by future President Lincoln, dating from 1838. Joshua Shenk has more in the New Yorker:
On August 25, 1838, the Sangamo Journal, a four-page Whig newspaper in Springfield, Illinois, carried its usual mixture of ads, news, and editorials. Wallace & Diller’s Drug and Chemical Store had just received a fresh supply of sperm oil, fishing rods, and French cologne. L. Higby, the town collector, gave notice that all citizens must pay their street tax or face “trouble.” Atop the news page, the paper carried an unsigned poem, thirty-six lines long. The poem, which is typical of the era, in its sentiment and morbidness, stands out now for two reasons: first, its subject is suicide (the title of the poem is “The Suicide’s Soliloquy”); second, its author was most likely a twenty-nine-year-old politician and lawyer named Abraham Lincoln.
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