Incomplete

Valéry famously said, a poem is never finished, only abandoned. It is impossible to perfect a work, of course. Even if a line or stanza has been perfected by making all the best word choices, there is always the possibility of adding more lines to it, or the poem. And adding more alters the context, such that what was the best artistic choice may no longer be so. It is just like Gödel's incompleteness theorems, where extending a formal system to prove a previously unprovable theorem adds new unprovable theorems to the system. The trick then, is to find the right point at which to abandon a work.