Монолог самоубийцы: Поэма, приписываемая Аврааму Линкольну.

Poem

"The Suicide's Soliloquy" is an unsigned poem, possibly written by Abraham Lincoln, first published on August 25, 1838, in The Sangamo Journal, a four page Whig newspaper in Springfield, Illinois. Shortly after Lincoln's assassination, one of Lincoln's personal friends, Joshua Speed, told William Herndon, Lincoln's biographer, that Lincoln had written and published "a few lines under the gloomy title of Suicide", although the article had never been found. In 1997, independent writer Richard Lawrence Miller found The Suicide's Soliloquy and, in 2002, came to realize that it matched the descriptions of Lincoln's missing article. Although it seems to follow the same themes and style as Lincoln's other works, there is still controversy over whether it was actually written by Lincoln.

The poem was published in the Sangamo Journal, a newspaper in which Lincoln had previously published other works. The poem uses a similar meter, sync, dictation and tone with many other poems published by Lincoln and according to Richard Miller, the man who discovered the poem, the theme of the interplay between rationality and madness is "especially Lincolnian in spirit". In addition to this, many of the symptoms of depression that Lincoln expressed in letters and other writings are discussed in this poem. For example, one of Lincoln's symptoms was described as a "storm in his brain, punctuated by thunderclaps of thought self critical, fearful, despairing". He also wrote of an "intensity of thought, which will some times wear the sweetest idea thread bare and turn it to the bitterness of death". In the poem, the narrator exclaims, "To ease me of this power to think,/ That through my bosom raves,/ I'll headlong leap from hell's high brink,/ And wallow in its waves." Although some doubt remains around the authorship of the poem, one Lincoln scholar said, "It looks like Lincoln. It sounds like Lincoln. It probably is Lincoln."