9. ‘Scylla and Charybdis’

R. H. Winnick earned his Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Princeton University in 1976, receiving dissertation credit for his co-authorship, as a graduate student, of Robert Frost: The Later Years, 1938–1963 (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977), vol. 3 of the late Lawrance Thompson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning (for vol. 2) ‘official’ Frost biography. He next researched an authorized biography of the American poet, playwright, educator, journalist, and statesman Archibald MacLeish, and edited Letters of Archibald MacLeish, 1907 to 1982 (Houghton Mifflin, 1983). Winnick’s next book, Tennyson’s Poems: New Textual Parallels, published in 2019 by Open Book Publishers, documented more than a thousand previously unrecognized, unidentified, or misidentified textual parallels in the work of that poet, and has since been accessed online or downloaded more than thirty thousand times. He has also published sixteen article-length studies on Chaucer, Sidney, Shakespeare, Melville, Clough, Hardy, and Larkin, appearing in, among other journals, The Chaucer Review, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Literary Imagination, The Hardy Review, and About Larkin.