Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Graves

Shakespeare’s best trick might be surviving his own fan club. Robert Graves nails a distinctly modern annoyance: the way relentless praise can start to feel like marketing, and marketing can make even genius look suspicious. “In spite of all the people who say he is very good” is the barb. It suggests that hype doesn’t just inflate reputations; it can actively cheapen them, turning real achievement into a social duty. Graves is protecting Shakespeare from Shakespeareanism.

The line works because it treats literary prestige as a kind of noise pollution. If everyone in the room is insisting you must be moved, your resistance hardens. You don’t want to be conned into reverence, especially by people using the same stale superlatives. Graves grants the reader permission to be bored by the pieties and still end up impressed by the work itself. That’s the quiet confidence here: Shakespeare doesn’t need the ushering and the incense.

Context matters. Graves, a novelist and poet with a prickly relationship to institutions, wrote in a 20th-century culture where Shakespeare had become both national monument and classroom cudgel. The canon was less a bookshelf than a discipline. His joke makes room for an authentic encounter: shut out the chorus of dutiful applause, and the plays still hit. The compliment lands precisely because it refuses to sound like one.