who wrote the poem footsteps in the sand
Footprints (poem) The authorship of the poem is disputed, with a number of people claiming to have written it. In 2008, Rachel Aviv in a Poetry Foundation article[1] discusses the claims of Burrell Webb, Mary Stevenson, Margaret Fishback Powers, and Carolyn Joyce Carty. Later that year, The Washington Post, covering a lawsuit between the claims of Stevenson, Powers and Carty, said that "At least a dozen people" had claimed credit for the poem.[2]
Salt-Water Poems and Ballads In The Collected Poems of John Masefield the opening line was changed to the text now more commonly anthologised: "I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky". The first lines of the second and third stanzas retained the form "I must down to the seas again [...]".[2]