Desiderata

This was my maternal grandfather’s favorite poem, and my mother’s. It’s mine too.

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.

You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

Max Ehrmann, “Desiderata.” Text as reproduced in the appendix to Bell v. Combined Registry Co., 397 F. Supp. 1241, 1250 (N.D. Ill. 1975).⁵ Paragraph breaks follow common printings.

Max Ehrmann, a Hoosier lawyer and poet

Born

September 26, 1872, Terre Haute, Indiana¹

Schooling

DePauw University, class of 1894, in literature and philosophy; then two years of graduate work in letters and philosophy at Harvard¹

Law

Returned to Terre Haute to practice law in 1898, and served as a deputy state’s attorney¹

Writing

Worked in his family’s business, the Ehrmann Manufacturing Company, then left it for a life of writing¹

The poem

Copyrighted January 3, 1927, as a published card (No. A 962402), under his business name, Indiana Publishing Company.³

Died

September 9, 1945; buried in Highland Lawn Cemetery, Terre Haute¹

Remembered

Bill Wolfe’s sculpture Max Ehrmann at the Crossroads, unveiled at Seventh and Wabash in Terre Haute on August 26, 2010. Because of downtown hotel construction, it was taken down in January 2025; a permanent site across from the Swope Art Museum is planned²

The poem that went to war

Ehrmann hoped to leave something behind. “I should like, if I could, to leave a humble gift … : a bit of chaste prose that had caught up some noble moods,” he wrote in his diary.³ At Christmas in 1933 he sent it to friends on his holiday cards.³

In July 1942 a letter arrived from Merrill Moore, a Boston psychiatrist who had just joined the Army Medical Corps and was stationed in Denver. Moore was also a poet, one of the Fugitive poets of Vanderbilt, and wrote more than 50,000 sonnets in his lifetime.⁸ “I think you should know,” he told Ehrmann, “that nearly every day of my life I use your very fine prose poem Desiderata in my work.” A depressed patient had once handed him a copy with no name on it, and he guessed he had given away a thousand copies since.³

He asked to share it with the soldiers he was treating. Ehrmann answered on November 3, 1942:

Yes, of course, you may distribute multigraphed copies of Desiderata to the soldiers. I am happy to have at least this small part in your splendid work.

Max Ehrmann to Merrill Moore³

Moore carried it from Denver to New Zealand and on to the Pacific, where he served with an Army hospital and earned a Bronze Star for his work at Bougainville.⁸ In November 1944 he wrote Ehrmann that he still used the poem “liberally”: “Like a panacea (it cures everything) it should be bottled and sold as Dr. EHRMANN’S MAJIC SOUL MEDICINE!!!”³ Ehrmann died the next September.¹ A poet-lawyer’s poem, carried to soldiers by a poet-physician: when he let it be copied freely without a copyright notice, he helped put it in the public domain.

The 1692 legend

For years the poem circulated as an anonymous text “Found in Old St. Paul’s Church, Baltimore, Dated 1692.” It wasn’t. In 1959 or 1960 the rector of St. Paul’s, a church founded in 1692, handed out copies to his congregation on a sheet headed with the church’s name and founding year, and the attribution spread from there.^{3, 4} The Seventh Circuit put it plainly: “Hoosier poet Max Ehrmann is the undisputed author of the prose poem Desiderata.”⁴

Bell v. Combined Registry Co.

Ehrmann’s widow renewed the copyright in 1954 and left it to her nephew, who sold it in 1971 to Robert L. Bell, a publisher.³ Bell had already won a suit in Ohio over unauthorized copies.⁶ Success Unlimited magazine had run the poem in 1967 with the 1692 attribution. Success Unlimited magazine had run the poem in March 1967 with the 1692 attribution. After it ran it again in August 1971, Bell sued its publisher, the Combined Registry Company, in federal court in Chicago.³

The case was decided on the written record: exhibits stipulated as authentic, three sets of briefs, and the old letters themselves. Judge Flaum admitted the old letters and articles under a new hearsay exception for ancient documents, Federal Rule of Evidence 803(16), which had taken effect on July 1, 1975, about two weeks before he ruled.^{3, 4} He found that Moore’s wartime distribution, made with Ehrmann’s permission, was a general publication. No one could produce a copy that carried a copyright notice, and the court found that, more likely than not, none did. The copyright was forfeited, and abandoned as well.³

The Seventh Circuit affirmed on forfeiture on May 14, 1976. It held that the 1933 Christmas cards were not a general publication. It rejected Bell’s argument that Moore, as an Army officer, had published the poem “by the Government,” which would not have cost the copyright. And it did not need to decide his argument that publication overseas did not count, because Moore had handed out copies in Denver too. It did not decide abandonment.⁴

1. DePauw University Archives and Special Collections, Max Ehrmann papers, biographical note. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
2. David Kronke, “Max Ehrmann statue leaving Seventh & Wabash,” Tribune-Star, January 2, 2025. ↩
3. Bell v. Combined Registry Co., 397 F. Supp. 1241 (N.D. Ill. 1975). ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
4. Bell v. Combined Registry Co., 536 F.2d 164 (7th Cir. 1976). ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
5. Appendix to 397 F. Supp. 1241, at 1250. ↩
6. Bell v. Pro Arts, Inc., 366 F. Supp. 474 (N.D. Ohio 1973), aff’d, 511 F.2d 451 (6th Cir. 1975); see 397 F. Supp. at 1244. ↩ ↩
7. 17 U.S.C. § 304(b) (a copyright still in its renewal term when the Sonny Bono Act took effect on October 27, 1998, lasts “95 years from the date copyright was originally secured”); 17 U.S.C. § 305 (terms run to the end of the calendar year). ↩
8. Vanderbilt University Special Collections, Merrill Moore Papers, biographical note and chronology. ↩ ↩

Explore further

• Max Ehrmann papers, DePauw Archives
• Ehrmann’s works on Wikisource
• Public Domain Day, Duke Law
• Copyright term chart, Cornell
• The Public Domain Review
• U.S. Copyright Office records