Representative Men is a collection of lectures by Ralph Waldo Emerson on six “great men,” including Plato, Shakespeare, and Napoleon. I found it through this tweet by Visakan Veerasamy:
Emerson wrote the definitive essay on this topic 176 years ago, ‘Uses of Great Men’
nothing that popped off before will pop off again in the same way, because we live in a world that’s changed by the cascades that followed.
He was replying to someone who said the Beatles would not pop off today.