Tennyson’s Poems: New Textual Parallels

Roy Winnick effectively updates the annotations so vital to scholarship in Christopher Ricks’s 1987 edition of Tennyson to create an important new reference work. Particularly significant are the echoes of women poets that Winnick locates in Tennyson’s poetry in addition to new biblical and classical allusions. In its print version Tennyson’s Poems: New Textual Parallels is a handbook for systematic study of Tennyson; in digital form it is a highly useful searchable database.

In Tennyson’s Poems: New Textual Parallels, R. H. Winnick identifies more than a thousand previously unknown instances in which Tennyson phrases of two or three to as many as several words are similar or identical to those occurring in prior works by other hands—discoveries aided by the proliferation of digitized texts and the related development of powerful search tools over the three decades since the most recent major edition of Tennyson’s poems was published.

Each of these instances may be deemed an allusion (meant to be recognized as such and pointing, for definable purposes, to a particular antecedent text), an echo (conscious or not, deliberate or not, meant to be noticed or not, meaningful or not), or merely accidental.  Unless accidental, Winnick writes, these new textual parallels significantly expand our knowledge both of Tennyson’s reading and of his thematic intentions and artistic technique.  Coupled with the thousand-plus textual parallels previously reported by Christopher Ricks and other scholars, he says, they suggest that a fundamental and lifelong aspect of Tennyson’s art was his habit of echoing any work, ancient or modern, which had the potential to enhance the resonance or deepen the meaning of his poems. 

 

Tennyson's Poems: New Textual Parallels
R. H. Winnick | Forthcoming in 2019
ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-661-3
ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-662-0
ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-663-7
ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-664-4
ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-665-1

ISBN XML: 978-1-78374-666-8

DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0161

BIC: D (Literature and literary studies), DC (Poetry), DCF (Poetry by individual poets), DSBF (Literary studies: c. 1800 to c. 1900), 3MNQ-GB-V (Victorian period (1837–1901)); BISAC: LIT004120  (LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh), LIT000000 (LITERARY CRITICISM / General), LIT024040 (LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 19th Century), LIT014000 (LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry)

R. H. Winnick holds a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Princeton University.  As a graduate student at Princeton, he co-authored Robert Frost: The Later Years, 1938–1963 (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977), volume 3 of the late Lawrance Thompson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning (for volume 2) ‘official’ biography, for which he received dissertation credit.  He next researched the biography of the American poet, playwright, educator, journalist, and statesman Archibald MacLeish, and edited Letters of Archibald MacLeish 1907 to 1982 (Houghton Mifflin, 1983).  As an independent scholar, Winnick has also published or placed eighteen articles on Chaucer, Sidney, Shakespeare, Melville, Clough, Hardy, and Larkin—most of these on textual parallels in the works of those authors—in The Chaucer Review, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Victorian Poetry, The Hardy Review, Literary Imagination, Notes and Queries, and About Larkin.