First and foremost I offer my sincere thanks to all the poets and publishers who allowed me to reprint their works included in this book:
E. H. Merriman, "Riding on a Dray," originally published in "A Story of the Early Days in Springfield-And a Poem," Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 16, nos. 1-2 (April-July 1923): 141-46.
Mary A. Denison, "To Mrs. Lincoln," and Emissus, "To Mrs. Lincoln," originally published in J. N. Plotts, ed., Poetical Tributes to the Memory of Abraham Lincoln (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1865), 81-83, 222-23.
George Moses Horton, "Mrs. Lincoln's Lamentation," originally published in George Moses Horton, Naked Genius (Raleigh, N.C.: Wm. B. Smith & Co., 1865), 155-57.
Sarah E. Carmichael, "President Lincoln's Funeral," originally published in Sarah E. Carmichael, Poems (Utah, 1866), 21-24.
Marion Mills Miller, "Lady of Lincoln," originally published in Thomas Del Vecchio, ed., Contemporary American Male Poets: An Anthology of Verse by 459 Living Poets (New York: Henry Harrison, 1937), 164.
Courtenay Fraser Fite, "The Spirit of Mary Todd Speaks," originally published in Jackson [Miss.] Daily News, Feb. 18, 1940.
Reed Miles Perkins, "Mary Todd Lincoln," originally published in Reed Miles Perkins, Prairie Poems (Springfield, Ill.: Frye Printing, 1946), 16.
Jane Merchant, "Valentine for Mary Lincoln," originally published in Washington Star, Feb. 14, 1955.
Della Crowder Miller, "Mary Visits Lexington: 1848-1849," and "Mrs. Lincoln Given Social Snubs: October 1861," originally published in Della Crowder Miller, Abraham Lincoln: A Biographic Treatment in Sonnet Sequence, 3 vols. (Boston: Christopher Publishing House, 1965), 2:82, 3:53.
Edward C. Lynskey, "Mrs. Lincoln Enters Bellevue Place," originally published in College English 49, no. 8 (Dec. 1987): 891.
Edward C. Lynskey, "Mrs. Lincoln's Epistle from Bellevue Place," originally published in Commonweal 124, no. 11 (June 6, 1997): 12.
Julianna Baggott, "Mary Todd on Her Deathbed," originally published in Quarterly West 48 (Spring/Summer 1999): 34-35; reprinted in Best American Poetry 2000, and in Baggott, Lizzie Borden in Love: Poems in Women's Voices (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, 2006), 17-18.
Laurence Overmire, "Willie at the Foot of the Bed (An Ode to Mary Todd Lincoln)," originally published on Ancestry.com, 2003.
Kathleen Flenniken, "To Ease my Mind," originally published in Iowa Review 34, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 76; reprinted in Kathleen Flenniken, Famous (Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2006): 69-70, by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright ? 2006 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.
Dan Guillory, "'Love Is Eternal'-November 4, 1842," and "Litany for Mary T.," originally published in Dan Guillory, The Lincoln Poems (Mahomet, Ill.: Mayhaven Publishing, 2007), 48-49, 52-55.
Julianna Baggott, "An Open Letter to Mrs. Lincoln," originally published on Quickmuse.com, October 2008.
R. T. Smith, "Mary Lincoln Triptych," originally published in the Winter 2012 issue of The Missouri Review.
I also am indebted to the Board of Trustees of the Mary Todd Lincoln House in Lexington, Kentucky, for allowing me to use a copy of their previously unpublished Mary Lincoln portrait, painted by Lloyd Ostendorf, as an illustration; and to the Batavia Depot Museum in Batavia, Illinois, for the use of their portrait of Bellevue Place Sanitarium.
Special thanks to James Cornelius, curator of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, not only for the wonderful afterword he contributed to this book, but also for helping find a few of these obscure poems for me.
