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Hi Max,

I'll try to address a few of your stated issues here.

I think you are correct in asserting progress of the poet that literature and the humanities serve a vital (maybe the most vital...) role in articulating meaning from nothing.  Indeed the best psychological analysis of Hamlet will never suffice for a live acted viewing of Shakespeare's work, in the same way that I think a knowledge of astrophysics doesn't make Orion's belt appear any brighter.  Isn't that the appeal of the humanities and (I'm hesitant to make the leap) the arts?  They have no bounds for grounding their observations among a league of restrictions in which the sciences must be bound. 

My experience of doing science is akin to that of writing.  I like both for the reason that good science and good writing force you to make order out of the chaos of observations/ideas that you've assembled.  The scientist must support statements with evidence (often quantitative or visually qualitative), while the writer must construct his ideas along the medium of paper and isn't allowed the freedom of a poet to arrange words according to some personal order on the page.  Instead, the creator of the work in both cases must obey some generally accepted (universal?) rules about presentation and communication to produce work.  Albeit in both cases their limitations are different, I think the point is the same in that there are operational rules in effect that limit what the scientist and writer can produce and communicate (rationally) to others.

Inherently, as I think a poet like Keats would argue (read the preface/introduction of Richard Dawkins' Unweaving the Rainbow), the humanists (or artists) look upon the sciences with contempt because of the sciences' inadequacy to describe phenomena accurately.  So, in summary, I might understand where you're coming from in thinking that the subjective approach of the artists (humanist?) far exceeds the more (at least purported) objective approach of the scientist in describing phenomena.

It seems to me that you answer your own dilemma, however, when you are concerned later that the sciences treat the humanities and arts as handmaidens: inspiration for more scientific progress.  As I see myself doing more science in the near future, this is much of my approach to the humanities and arts (and gladly so).  I cannot count the number of times insights from courses in philosophy, German, literature and art history have forced me to reevaluate the way scientists traditionally approach the same phenomena.  For instance, I vividly remember doing field work after my art history course on the history of landscape art, and revising all of my typical methods for doing the geology that I would have normally approached differently.  True, I was using the humanities as a servant to my science, but is that unethical?  Couldn't that be 'good', as it applies the work of poetry and art to a practical/operational use?

Further, I think you would probably agree that advances in technology have drastically revolutionized the way art and humanities is done.  Take word processors and the internet for example, without which, this very forum wouldn't be possible.  To close, I would say that the humanities are NOT degraded to the level of 'heroic impotence' as you suggest but instead occupy a role of freedom and creativity unparalleled in the sciences, and territory in which no science should ever trespass.