inner travel

Outer travel becomes the setting of inner travel, but if the mood is somewhat that of the Odyssey, the travelers are less able and confident than Odysseus, and the world less viable to purpose. The width of things and the isolation of the characters look forward to much in the Hellenistic Age, and even in the Aeneid, rather than back to the sureness of the Odyssey. Of the classical Greek writers, Euripides notably created a language for privacy of experience, and he paradoxically did so by pressing intellectually farther than other poets and finding no solution in it.

—John H. Finlay, Jr., “The Theoretical Mind,” Four Stages of Greek Thought (Stanford U. Press, 1966)

individual, intelligible, inner need

The absence of any one of these conditions excludes a work form the category of art and relegates it to that of art's counterfeits. If the work does not transmit the artist's peculiarity of feeling and is therefore not individual, if it is unintelligibly expressed, or if it has not proceeded from the author's inner need for expression - it is not a work of art. If all these conditions are present, even in the smallest degree, then the work, even if a weak one, is yet a work of art.

—Leo Tolstoy, "What Is Art?" (translation by Alymer Maude, 1899)

poets inside and out

The monastic poet half-dreaming at his desk in the attic stirred by the street poet declaiming from the stoop to passersby.