Kindred Spirits

An American student of British Romanticism, when he turns to the study of the domestic variety, soon finds himself obsessed with, lost in, dazed by--Emerson. Otherwise, he can't hope to find himself at all. Emerson is appalling and peculiar--at first. Then he is--simply--ourselves, perhaps for worse. But--a certain way into him--he is what Matthew Arnold asserted him to be--


the friend and the aider of anyone whatsoever who would live in his spirit.

--Harold Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, 46.