CONCEPT
The Six Revisionary Ratios
Bloom's taxonomy of the mechanisms through which the strong poet transforms the predecessor's overwhelming achievement into raw material for originality — clinamen, tessera, kenosis, daemonization, askesis, and apophrades.
The six revisionary ratios are Bloom's technical vocabulary for the mechanisms through which the strong poet transforms the predecessor's achievement into raw material for originality. Each ratio names a different operation of creative misreading, and together they constitute a typology of the strong poet's psychodynamic struggle with the predecessor. The six ratios — clinamen, tessera, kenosis, daemonization, askesis, and apophrades — are neither a sequence every strong poet must follow in order nor a complete taxonomy of all possible creative moves. They are a diagnostic vocabulary that Bloom elaborated across multiple books, borrowed from sources as varied as Lucretian physics, Christian theology, Gnosticism, and Kabbalah. The ratios acquire new resonance in the AI age because they describe what the machine structurally cannot do: each requires the motivation of a threatened self confronting a specific predecessor, conditions the LLM does not satisfy.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Clinamen — the creative swerve — comes first because it establishes