Desiderata (which is latin for - ("things desired") written by the American Poet: Max Erhmann Max Ehrmann of Terre Haute, Indiana, wrote the work in the early 1920s, starting in 1921, but he did not use any title. He registered for his US copyright in 1927 via its first phrase. In 1933 he distributed the poem in the form of a Christmas card, evidently entitling it "Desiderata" because a few days later he wrote in his Journal that a Kansas editor criticized his "Desiderata". Several years before 1942 a depressed woman gave psychiatrist Merrill Moore a copy of the poem without the name of the author, allowing him to hand out over 1,000 unattributed copies to his patients and soldiers during World War II. After Ehrmann died in 1945, his widow first published the work in 1948 in The Poems of Max Ehrmann. The Reverend Frederick Kates handed out about 200 unattributed copies to his congregation at Old Saint Paul's Church, Baltimore, during 1959 or 1960.