Footprints
There’s an article at Poetry Foundation by Rachel Aviv on the origins of that (in)famous poem “Footprints”, beloved across the world by church bulletins and Christian easy-listening fans. The competing claims to authorship stretch back possibly as far as 60 or 70 years, but in spite of appearance on coffee mugs and greeting cards for decades, the article says:
Although nearly all of these authors claim they wrote the poem in longhand, dictated by God, the controversy didn’t surface until everyone began putting their versions online.
Aviv uses this quiet controversy as a touchstone for meditation on the burden of originality and the ease with which accidental plagiarism can occur, with a detour through Jung, Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Spurgeon. The Spurgeon quote she pulls out is interesting in itself as an illustration of the meteoric fall from eloquence in the Evangelical tradition. Compare:
And did you ever walk out upon that lonely desert island upon which you were wrecked, and say, “I am alone, — alone, — alone, — nobody was ever here before me”? And did you suddenly pull up short as you noticed, in the sand, the footprints of a man? I remember right well passing through that experience; and when I looked, lo! it was not merely the footprints of a man that I saw, but I thought I knew whose feet had left those imprints; they were the marks of One who had been crucified, for there was the print of the nails. So I thought to myself, “If he has been here, it is a desert island no longer.”
The poetry in Spurgeon’s original sermon, to which an homage in the Footprints poem is evident (though denied by the various claimants of the mantle of inspiration - “I’ve never heard of the fellow [Spurgeon], so he couldn’t have possibly inspired me,” Webb says) is full eclipse of the “poetry” of the execrable little poem the entire debate centers on.
As an aside, after reading the article don’t forget to check out the comments. There’s a flameware from January through March between several of the commenters and the self-styled One True Author of the inspirational anthem Footprints, Carolyn Joyce Carty, “Child Prodigy-World Renowned Faith Poet-Author”.