The hope of [the strong Nietzschean poet] is that what the past tried to do to her she will succeed in doing to the past: to make the past itself, including those very causal processes which blindly impressed all her own behaving, bear her impress. Success in that enterprise — the enterprise of saying ‘Thus I willed it’ to the past – is success in what Bloom calls ‘giving birth to oneself’.

— Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity