Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Stuart Calverley

The line lands like a genteel slap because it parodies the voice of cultivated snobbery while quietly confessing how absurd that snobbery is. Calverley, a poet best known for his light verse and razor-clean parodies, isn’t really filing a complaint against Milton or Shakespeare; he’s staging a performance of the kind of reader who needs literature to function as a status badge. Calling Milton “dry” and dismissing Shakespeare for “common life” are provocations precisely because they’re indefensible. The joke depends on the audience knowing that Milton’s grandeur and Shakespeare’s range are the point.

The intent is satirical: a caricature of aesthetic gatekeeping that mistakes difficulty for virtue and elitism for taste. “Read not” has the ring of moral instruction, as if the speaker is protecting you from contamination by the merely great. The subtext is nastier and funnier: some people want art to flatter their self-image, not to enlarge it. Shakespeare gets condemned not for being inaccessible, but for being too accessible - too human, too crowded with ordinary motives and messy realities. That reveals a fear of “common life” as much as a distaste for it.

Context matters. In Victorian literary culture, Milton and Shakespeare were pillars of education and national identity, invoked as proof of refinement. Calverley flips that piety into comedy, showing how quickly reverence can curdle into rote opinion. The line works because it weaponizes understatement and inversion: it pretends to be a rule for better reading while exposing the readerly vanity behind such rules.