Daily Inspiration Quote by Stephen Greenblatt

Greenblatt’s genius here is that he praises Shakespeare the way you’d describe a natural disaster: not refined craftsmanship, but pressure, heat, and sudden release. “Volcano” and “eruption” reframe literary invention as geology. The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the museum-piece Shakespeare we’re often handed in school - polished, canonical, safely “great.” Greenblatt insists on Shakespeare as a live event, a force that doesn’t just arrange English but expands it. The awe isn’t only at the plays; it’s at the language itself being mid-formation.

The line also telegraphs Greenblatt’s critical project. As a leading figure in New Historicism, he’s less interested in Shakespeare as solitary genius than as someone plugged into a charged culture - London’s theater economy, court politics, classical imitation, popular speech, imported words, social ambition. Calling it a “volcano of words” implies a whole system building pressure beneath the surface: the collision of Renaissance learning, urban energy, and the commercial stage. Shakespeare becomes the vent where all that accumulated force escapes.

Notice the double emphasis: “never used before” and “never been used… before.” It’s incantatory, almost breathless, mimicking the overflow it describes. “It pours out of him” is the final trick: it naturalizes the labor into seeming inevitability. The intent isn’t to deny craft, but to capture the sensation of encountering Shakespeare at full speed - a writer whose most radical move was making English feel bigger than it had been five minutes earlier.