About: The Suicide's Soliloquy

"The Suicide's Soliloquy" is an unsigned poem, likely 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 actual article has 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.