Ralph Waldo Emerson on his 200th birthday this spring is “closer to us than ever,” writes the great Harold Bloom.

He is a man for bloggers to embrace most especially, not for Emerson’s glory but for our own understanding of a transformative moment we are living through.

Poet, public intellectual, performance artist and incomparable diarist, Emerson (1803-1882) has glory enough. It’s we who need his encouraging frame around bloggery–this still strange and marvellous exercise in democratic media.[story]