The poem “Hamatreya” was based on a passage from the Vishnu Purana (one of the traditional Vedantic mythologies). Emerson copied the passage into his journal in 1845. “Hamatreya” first appeared in print in Poems, published by Chapman in London and by Munroe in Boston late in 1846 (the title pages dated 1847). The Boston edition of Poems was reprinted many times. (In 1865, Ticknor and Fields issued the title in their famous “Blue and Gold” format.) In 1876, the poem was included in the ninth volume (Selected Poems) of the Little Classic Edition of Emerson’s writings, in 1884 in the ninth volume (Poems) of the Riverside Edition, and in 1904 in the ninth volume (Poems) of the Centenary Edition. It has been included in many collected editions of Emerson, among them the 1946 The Portable Emerson (edited by Mark Van Doren), the 1965 Signet Classic Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (edited by William H. Gilman), and the 1994 Library of America Collected Poems and Translations (selected and annotated by Harold Bloom and Paul Kane
