Kenosis — The Strategic Self-Emptying

Kenosis is the strangest of Bloom's revisionary ratios — the move in which the strong poet deliberately empties the self of power in order to break the connection to the predecessor that full strength would maintain. The word comes from Paul's letter to the Philippians, where it describes Christ's self-emptying in the incarnation: the divine becoming human, the infinite becoming finite. Bloom secularized the concept: the poet empties the self of competencies that belong to the predecessor to discover what remains when the predecessor's influence is subtracted. The remainder, if the poet is strong enough, is the poet's own. The emptying is not weakness but the most radical form of strength — requiring sacrifice of the very capacities that have earned admiration and professional identity in order to find something the competencies were concealing.