Desiderata

"Desiderata" (Latin: "things desired") is an early 1920s prose poem by the American writer Max Ehrmann. The text was widely distributed in poster form in the 1960s and 1970s. History Max Ehrmann of Terre Haute, Indiana started writing the work in 1921, but he did not assign it a title. He registered for his U.S. copyright in 1927 using the poem's first phrase as its title. The April 5, 1933 issue of Michigan Tradesman magazine published the full, original text on its cover, crediting Ehrmann as its author. In 1933, he distributed the poem in the form of a Christmas card, now officially titled "Desiderata." Psychiatrist Merrill Moore distributed more than 1,000 unattributed copies to his patients and soldiers during World War II. After Ehrmann died in 1945, his widow published the work in 1948 in The Poems of Max Ehrmann. The 1948 version was in the form of one long prose paragraph, so earlier and later versions were presumably also in that form. The reverend Frederick Kates distributed about 200 unattributed copies as devotional materials for his congregation at Old Saint Paul's Church, Baltimore during 1959 or 1960. The papers mentioned the church's foundation date of 1692, which has caused many to falsely assume that the date is that of the poem's origination.