What does the artist want?

What is a work of art supposed to achieve for the artist?

Robert Graves proposed an answer: the poet is attempting to remove "a concenration which will persist uncomfortfortably" until the poem goes into "circulation".

It is not that art is stronger than science. It's that science is only as strong as the arts that make it possible.

"There is the question: what relation must one fact (such as a sentence) have to another in order to be capable of being a symbol for that other? This is a logical question, and it is the one with which Mr. Wittgenstein is concerned." (Bertrand Russell)

There is another question: what relation must one fact (such as a body) have to another in order to be receptive to the symbolism of that other? This is a question of pathos, and it is one that Mallarmé, Williams, and Olson were very much conerned about.

There is a truth in loneliness
if you can endure it.

There are also communal truths;
school sustains them.

Literature: The loneliness that is the truth of things. (Virginia Woolf)

Scholarship: The truth that becomes a community, i.e., that people communicate to each other.