Daily Inspiration Quote by Stephen Greenblatt

Greenblatt is admitting the essential hustle of serious criticism: you want to resurrect a “lost world,” but you can’t do it by embalming it. The line balances two competing fidelities. On one side sits the scholar’s aspiration to contact-history - the texture of vanished assumptions, rituals, and power relations that produced the work. On the other sits the magnetic force that keeps the work alive for non-specialists: plot, character, beauty, scandal, emotional voltage. The sentence stages that tension as a tightrope walk, not a victory lap.

The key phrase is “holding onto.” It signals restraint. Greenblatt isn’t chasing archival novelty for its own sake; he’s wary of the academic reflex to turn art into a specimen pinned under glass. “What draws readers and audiences there in the first place” quietly rebukes criticism that forgets desire - the original lure of Shakespeare or the Renaissance isn’t a footnote trail, it’s pleasure, curiosity, and recognition.

Context matters: Greenblatt is a flagship voice of New Historicism, a movement often caricatured as reducing literature to ideology and social control. This quote reads like a corrective to that caricature. He wants immersion without disenchantment, historical otherness without killing the theatrical charge that made the text travel across centuries.

Subtext: the critic is also a storyteller competing for attention in a crowded culture. To “get that sense” is an aesthetic goal as much as an intellectual one. Greenblatt is arguing that good criticism doesn’t just interpret; it re-animates - it lets you feel the past pressing back while keeping the page turning.