Health Programs

The Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism 1998-1999

Joshua Wolf Shenk

Freelance Writer
Former Associate Editor of U. S. News & World Report
New York, New York
Website: www.shenk.net

TOPIC: Abraham Lincoln's battle with depression, how he coped, and connections between definitions of mental illness in Lincoln's era and our own

The Suicide Poem
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. The reputed existence of a "suicide poem" has lurked in the background of Lincoln scholarship since shortly after the President's death, in 1865, when his close friend Joshua Speed mentioned it to Lincoln's law partner and biographer William Herndon.

A Melancholy of Mine Own
After he has awoken, from uneasy dreams, to find himself transformed in his bed into a giant insect, Gregor Samsa's first encounter with the world outside his bedroom comes in the form of his mother's voice.