Late nineteenth-century symbolism in painting and poetry is often seen as a solipsistic turn away from the depiction of modern life to focus on the mental life of the artist. I turn to Edouard Manet's illustrations for Stéphane Mallarmé's translation of Edgar Allan Poe's "Raven" to suggest that they were doing something more ambitious: exploring the limits of intelligibility by attempting to fix in visual and literary form the most resolutely subjective aspects of experience. Not only does this involve them in the allegedly absurd task of making private languages manifest to others, but it reveals concerns akin to those of the era's mathematicians, philosophers and other thinkers anxious about the possibility of objective knowledge and shared effort in a world of individuals.