. . . apart from the precise mixture of certainty and hesitation in the poet`s mind, one of the sovereign gestures of art is to make the ideal real, and to project a dim impersonal awareness onto a structure of definite invention.
Literature is a process of communication, it `helps us to understand life`.
Perhaps we should also consider the motivation of the writer as a factor which distinguishes literary from other forms of writing. The writer`s motivation is the energy that pulls together the strands of his creativity in the shaping of the finished work.
Ernest Hemingway gives his reasons for writing:
From things that had happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of.
Georges Simenon puts forward the idea of therapeutic value, a search for self:
I think that if a man has the urge to be an artist, it is because he needs to find himself. Every writer has to find himself through his characters, through all his writing.
Philip Larkin gives his reasons for writing poems as a need `to preserve things I have seen/thought/felt (if I may so indicate a composite and complex experience) both for myself and for others`. Here, in The Whitsun Weddings, his motive was to capture his response to a view seen from a train: