Was Shakespeare a Poet?

The article focuses on the book "The Essential Shakespeare," by J. Dover Wilson. Shakespeare's "literary attainments and success were chiefly valued as serving the prosaic end of making permanent provision for himself and his daughters. That view of his interests is, as Wilson points out, the culmination of a tendency which goes as far back as Halliwell-Phillipps, but it is also, as he points out still further, neither inherently probable nor necessarily to be deduced from the meager facts and supposed facts upon which it is allegedly founded. In the first place, Shakespeare's father was a prosperous and prominent man in Stratford.