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Originally published 1927 | 5/5 Allpoetry | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Desiderata by max ehrmann
"Desiderata" (Latin: "desired things") is a 1927 prose poem by American writer Max Ehrmann. Largely unknown in the author's lifetime, the text became widely known after its use in devotional and spoken-word recordings in 1971 and 1972.
Contents
- Desiderata by max ehrmann
- Desiderata by max ehrmann ep 56
- History
- Uses in popular culture
- Copyright status
- References
Desiderata by max ehrmann ep 56
History
American writer Max Ehrmann (1872–1945) wrote the prose poem "Desiderata" in 1927. In 1956, the Reverend Frederick Kates, rector of Saint Paul's Church in Baltimore, Maryland, included Desiderata in a compilation of devotional materials for his congregation. The compilation included the church's foundation date: "Old Saint Paul's Church, Baltimore AD 1692". Consequently, the date of the text's authorship was (and still is) widely mistaken as 1692, the year of the church's foundation.
Uses in popular culture
There have been many uses of the poem in the popular canon:
Copyright status
The poem's copyright A 962402 was registered by Ehrmann on January 3, 1927, as "Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, etc. Card.", and was renewed by his widow, Bertha K. Ehrmann, in 1954.
In 1942, Max Ehrmann gave permission to Dr Charles Moore, a U.S. Army psychiatrist, to distribute copies of the poem to soldiers. Three years after Ehrmann's death, his widow included Desiderata in The Poems of Max Ehrmann, published in 1948 by the Bruce Humphries Publishing Company, of Boston. In 1967, Robert L. Bell, acquired the publishing rights from Bruce Humphries Publishing Company, where he was president, and then bought the copyright from Richard Wright, nephew and heir to the Ehrmann works.
In August 1971, the poem was published in Success Unlimited magazine, without permission from Robert L. Bell. In a 1976 lawsuit against the magazine's publisher, Combined Registry Company, the court ruled (and subsequently the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld) that copyright had been forfeited because the poem had been authorized for publication without a copyright notice in the 1940s – and that the poem was therefore in the public domain.