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"Desiderata" (Latin for "desired things", plural of desideratum) is an inspirational prose poem about attaining happiness in life. It begins: Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.^[1] Max Ehrmann first copyrighted it in 1927, but it was widely circulated in the 1960s without attribution to him.

Contents 1 History 2 References 3 See also 4 External links

[edit] History

Max Ehrmann (1872–1945), a poet and lawyer from Terre Haute, Indiana, is its author. It has been reported^{[by whom?]} that Desiderata was inspired by an urge that Ehrmann wrote about in his diary: "I should like, if I could, to leave a humble gift -- a bit of chaste prose that had caught up some noble moods." Conventional belief is that Ehrmann actually wrote the prose himself and copyrighted it in 1927.^[2]

Around 1959, the Rev. Frederick Kates, rector of Saint Paul's Church in Baltimore, Maryland, used the poem in a collection of devotional materials he compiled for his congregation. At the top of the handout was the notation: "Old Saint Paul's Church, Baltimore A.D. 1692." In the 1960s, it was widely circulated without attribution to Ehrmann, sometimes with the claim that it was found in Saint Paul's Church, Baltimore, Maryland, and that it had been written in 1692 (the year of the founding of Saint Paul's). Nevertheless, the estate of Ehrmann has kept various editions of the work in print.

When Adlai Stevenson died in 1965, a guest in his home found a copy of Desiderata near his bedside and discovered that Stevenson had planned to use it in his Christmas cards. The publicity that followed gave widespread fame to the poem, as well as the mistaken relationship to Saint Paul's Church.

As the material was handed from one friend to another, the authorship became clouded. Copies with the "Old Saint Paul's Church" notation were reprinted and distributed liberally in the years that followed. It is perhaps understandable that a later publisher would interpret this notation as meaning that the poem itself was found in Old Saint Paul's Church, and that it had been written in 1692. This notation no doubt added to the charm and historic appeal of the poem, despite the fact that the actual language in the poem suggests a more modern origin. The poem was popular prose for the various spiritual movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

At least one court case has held the poem to be forfeited to the public domain because of distribution during and before World War II, but other cases have ruled that the assignee, through Ehrmann's heirs, holds the purchased copyright.

A secretary who came across the poem during the First World War^{[dubious – discuss]} found it so inspiring that she began to distribute copies to soldiers, along with bibles.^{[citation needed]}

Les Crane's spoken-word recording reached no.8 on the Billboard magazine charts in late 1971. ^[3]

[edit] References

[edit] See also

• Desiderata
• Deteriorata - National Lampoon's 1972 parody of Les Crane's 1971 spoken word recording.

[edit] External links

• Desiderata
• Desiderata full poem
• Desiderata from Old St. Paul's Church, Baltimore, Maryland
• Hammond, Bruce (19-Jul-2004). "Desiderata". written at Weston, Florida. http://www.geocities.com/lswote/desiderata.html. Retrieved on 2009-03-28. ^{[unreliable source?]}