On Grammer (And Yes, I Know I Spelled Grammar Wrong)

There has been a growing trend, in academic circles and in my own life, to place grammar and its larger rules upon an impeachable pedestal. A growing number of people who seem to cling to the rules of grammar as if its only through the memorization of these rules and strict adherence to them that proper communication can be achieved. To these people I have but one word: Hogwash.
The application of grammatical rules is not the holy grail of the writing world. If anything the exact opposite is true and it is nothing but silly to pretend otherwise. There have been far too many different great works in far too many different phases of these rules to believe that the standards we have now are entirely correct and always will be.
Joyce never used quotation marks, Melville loved run-on sentences, and Kerouac barely even seems to be speaking English at times. Should we assume that these authors and their works are no longer worth reading because they do not adhere to the strict grammatical rules in use today? Or, even worse, should we retroactively edit their words, changing their concept of what they wrote so that every quotation mark follows a comma and semicolons are used correctly? Of course not. These works should no more be touched than arms should be affixed to the Venice De Milo. They were created when different rules applied, and this should be respected. But this does not mean that those different rules are antiquated versions of the written word when compared to what we have now and that today