Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Graves

Graves slips the knife in with a compliment. The line praises Shakespeare while mocking the cultural machinery that praises him: the schoolroom canon, the dutiful theatergoer, the critic who treats “Shakespeare is great” as a password rather than an argument. “In spite of all the people” is the twist. It suggests that relentless acclaim can become a kind of vandalism, smothering the work under layers of reverence until readers approach it like homework or scripture. Graves is rescuing Shakespeare from Shakespeareanism.

The intent is double: puncture the pose of cultivated certainty, and remind us that genuine excellence survives bad fandom. When a writer becomes a monument, the conversation around him can turn into a chorus of inherited opinions. Graves, a novelist and poet who lived through the early 20th century’s distrust of Victorian pieties, knows how reputations ossify. After modernism taught audiences to suspect tradition’s easy authority, Shakespeare’s ubiquity risked feeling like a cultural reflex: you’re supposed to admire him, so you do.

The subtext is almost democratic: don’t confuse consensus with experience. Graves implies that Shakespeare’s real proof is on the page and on the stage, not in the social performance of admiring him. The joke also flatters the reader: it invites you to be the kind of person who can like Shakespeare without needing the choir. Shakespeare emerges not as a museum piece but as a writer sturdy enough to outlast his own hype. That’s a harsher compliment than it sounds, and a better one.