Daily Inspiration Quote by Stephen Greenblatt

"Well it is certainly the case that the poems - which were in fact published during Shakespeare's lifetime - are weird if they began or originated in this form, as I think they did, because the poems get out of control"

Stephen Greenblatt, Critic

About this Quote

Greenblatt’s sentence performs the critic’s favorite move: make disorder sound like evidence. Calling Shakespeare’s poems "weird" isn’t a throwaway adjective; it’s a claim that their strangeness is structural, not incidental. He anchors that claim with a quiet credential check - they were "published during Shakespeare’s lifetime" - a way of preempting the perennial escape hatch that later editors, pirated quartos, or posthumous mythmaking are to blame. If the texts are contemporary, then the weirdness belongs to the moment, and maybe to Shakespeare himself.

The real tell is Greenblatt’s hypothetical: "if they began or originated in this form, as I think they did". That "I think" carries the whole enterprise of literary history: inference dressed as reasonable confidence. He’s signaling a preference for authorial intention without saying so outright, and he’s doing it in a way that fits New Historicism’s habit of treating texts as events with consequences, not museum pieces.

"Get out of control" is where the subtext sharpens. It frames the poems as machines that exceed their maker, language slipping its leash - desire, obsession, rhetorical patterning, even publication itself becoming forces that escalate past decorum. The line hints at a Shakespeare whose lyric voice isn’t purely "crafted" but pressured: by market circulation, by personal risk, by the genre’s appetite for extremity. Greenblatt’s intent is less to pathologize the poems than to make their unruliness productive: the instability is precisely what makes them historically alive and critically worth chasing.

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Topic	Poetry
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About the Author

Stephen Greenblatt (born November 7, 1943) is a Critic from USA.

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