Brahma (poem)
poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Brahma" is a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson, written in 1856, and published in the November 1857 issue of The Atlantic. It is named for Brahman, the universal principle of the Vedas.
About
Brahma is one of the poems composed by Ralph Waldo Emerson, an American transcendentalist of the nineteenth century. The poem is composed in the form of an utterance- a form which comprises sublime or metaphysical content while adding to it the balladic quatrain-music pattern. (A dramatic form not in vogue, and distinctly different from Browning's dramatic developments). The form, therefore, is the first of its kind to include Oriental poetical material in the Western verse framework. The central speaker of the poem is Brahman Himself, who according to Hindu philosophers of India, is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. The study of the vedantic philosophy, the Gita, and the Katha Upanishad is impressed upon the poem very forcefully. Body is transient, but within the body of man there is the soul that is the divine spark, eternal, everlasting and never-ending. It is a part of the over-soul who is the supreme God, the superpower of the universe.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4955493. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1856 and 1857.
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This entry incorporates text from “Brahma (poem)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.