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  • 2019-08-20 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Charlie Chaplin Write the Poem, 'As I Began to Love Myself'? (en)
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  • Charlie Chaplin was an actor, director, composer, and according to a persistent internet rumor, the author of a poem entitled, As I Began to Love Myself: In addition to the numerous websites that reproduced this poem in full while attributing it to Chaplin, a few stanzas of this poem have also been used to create share-worthy memes featuring the famous actor's image: This poem, however, was not penned by the silent-era actor. This actually appears to be an English translation of a Portuguese translation of an English-language book written by Kim and Alison McMillen. Before we get to the somewhat convoluted origins of this poem, let's consider the fact that Charlie Chaplin, who passed away at the age of 88 in 1977, was one of the most famous actors of the silent era. In addition to his own autobiography, dozens of books have been written and movies made about his life and work. If Chaplin truly wrote this poem, we should be able to easily find a record of where and when it was originally published. Yet, we were unable to find references to Chaplin's writing of this poem in any credible source. It seems that this poem has only been attributed to Chaplin on random blogs and internet memes. As for the poem itself, it appears to be a reworking of a selection of stanzas that were originally published in 2001 in the book When I Loved Myself Enough. Although the stanzas in the alleged Chaplin poem are not verbatim replicas of passages in the McMillens' book, they express familiar sentiments with similar language: In 2003, this book was translated into Portuguese by Iva Sofia Golcalves Lima under the title, Quando Me Amei de Verdade. That translated text was later abbreviated to a few select passages and started to spread around the internet. Here's how a portion of that text appeared in one 2005 blog post: This text continued to evolve as it was translated back into English. It's not entirely clear when Chaplin's name was first attached to the text, but it appears to have been sometime around 2007, about 30 years after the actor's death. In sum, the poem As I Began to Love Myself was not written by Charlie Chaplin. As far as we can tell, this poem is actually an English translation of Portuguese translation of an English language book written by Kim and Alison McMillen in 2001 entitled When I Loved Myself Enough. That text was then altered even further into the shareable form it consists of today. It's unclear who arranged these stanzas into their current form. (en)
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