You know that reaction after reading a page that leaves you with a sensation of missing something. A treatise about poetry or art or theology, especially?
If you’re like me and largely autodidactic, you no doubt feel yourself an outsider. So I write from the fringe, in more ways than one. Reading some reviews and critiques, I soon wonder: Am I simply inattentive? Clueless? Ignorant? Is it that such subtlety, speaking only to the highly initiated, will never accept my own efforts? Or is it that I prefer what is simple, direct, grounded in experience and place, over what is convoluted and cloaked – even in form? Without falling into cliche or triteness?
Or am I the one, despite myself, who becomes convoluted and cloaked? How do we reach higher, anyway, in this thing called art, while striving to stay true … to whatever?
How does originality run through it all? And life?
By the way, just who are the critics writing for? Even when we ourselves turn critic.
Jnana's Red Barn 
Your closing line reminds me of Bob Geldof who had a gig as a critic before working to please the critics.
I’m engrossed in the same mystery. I never write, as I used to, things that came from within me. These days I write commentary on what’s outside me–and I often wonder what the point is. Am I just writing to hear myself talk?
More likely, I sense, is a desire to engage in the dialogue.
quite right