SOURCE: Jensen, Ejner J. “Howard Nemerov and the Tyranny of Shakespeare.” Centennial Review 32 (spring 1988): 130-49.

In the following essay, Jensen notes the ways in which Nemerov owes a debt to Shakespeare in his themes, allusions, and use of language.

John Lehmann, writing in his autobiography, claimed for Shakespeare the greatest intellectual and creative sovereignty over the minds and feelings of both the writers who followed him and all those whose literary inheritance derives from the English tradition. Shakespeare, he declared,

was the key to the whole of English literature, the mastermind that determined its course and depth and vitality so fundamentally that we can scarcely conceive what our imaginative life—perhaps even our moral values—would be like without him.

His assertion, in its nature more of a celebratory declaration than a critical argument, was picked up and expanded upon by T. J. B. Spencer in his British...