George Whalley (25 July 1915 – 27 May 1983) was a scholar, poet, naval officer and secret intelligence agent during World War II, CBC broadcaster, musician, biographer, and translator.Moore, Michael. Editor. George Whalley: Remembrances. Kingston: Quarry Press, 1989. Print. He taught English at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario (1950–80) and was twice the head of the department. He was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 1959. He married Elizabeth Watts on July 25, 1944. They had three children: Katharine, Christopher, and Emily. His brother, Peter Whalley, was a famous artist and cartoonist.
Education Whalley attended St. Alban's School in Brockville, Ontario from 1922 to 1930. He completed his first B.A. in Classics at Bishop's University, in Lennoxville, Quebec, graduating in 1935. As a Rhodes Scholar, he completed his second B.A., studying Greats and Theology, at Oriel College, Oxford, in 1939. He received an M.A. from Oriel College, Oxford, in 1945. He completed his second M.A. degree, in English Literature, at Bishop's University in 1948. He received his Ph.D. from King's College, London, in English Literature by writing a study of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's reading, in 1950.
Military service 1940–56 Whalley served in the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve (1940–56) and was on active duty in the Royal Navy (1940–45). He served on warships (including and ), participated in the pursuit of the German battleship , saved a life at sea (for which he was awarded a Royal Humane Society Bronze Medal) and two lives from the surf at Praa Sands, worked as a naval intelligence officer, designed a marker buoy (codenamed the FH 830) used during the Sicily and Normandy landings, and secretly tested and designed surfboats used to land Allied agents in Europe covertly.
From September 1941 to March 1943 Whalley was assigned to the Admiralty Naval intelligence Division in London and was involved in planning and implementing special intelligence operations to Norway, Belgium, Holland, and France. From March to July 1943 Whalley served on the staff of DNCXF Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay in the Mediterranean Sea and Sicily. From July 1943 to March 1944 Whalley was assigned to the Admiralty Deputy Director Operations Division (irregular).
In the closing stages of the war, Whalley was returned to Canada to serve on Royal Canadian Navy destroyers. He was the First Lieutenant on from April to June 1945, and then on from June to August 1945.
After the war, Whalley commanded , the shore station in Kingston, Ontario (1952–56). He retired with the rank of commander in 1956.
In 1944 he was awarded the CVSM Ribbon and Clasp. On 13 May 1946, during a convocation ceremony at Bishop's University, he received the 1939–45 Star Ribbon, the Africa Star Ribbon, the Italy Star Ribbon, the France and Germany Star Ribbon and Clasp, and the Defence Medal Ribbon.
Poetry Whalley published two collections of poems that were written during and in the aftermath of World War Two. The first, Poems 1939–1944, was issued as part of the Ryerson Poetry Chapbook series in 1946. It contains 17 poems. The second book, No Man An Island, appeared in 1948. It contains 41 poems, some of which are reprinted from the chapbook. The Collected Poems of George Whalley, edited by George Johnston and published in 1986, contains 76 poems, including all of the pieces that appeared in the two earlier books. The Complete Poems of George Whalley, a volume of more than 250 poems edited by Michael John DiSanto, contains all of the published verses and all known unpublished pieces gathered from manuscripts and typescripts preserved in Queen's University Archives and private family papers. Whalley's "rare body of wartime poetry" Trehearne, Brian, ed. Canadian Poetry 1920–1960. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2010. p. 357. Print. has been praised as "war poems [that] display a mature range and scope that is unmatched by any other of the second world war poets".Lewis, David. Rev. of The Collected Poems of George Whalley, Ed. George Johnston. Queen’s Quarterly 94 (1987): 1045–7. p. 1046. John Ferns argues that Whalley's best poem is the seven-part 'Battle Pattern,' written about the pursuit and sinking of the Bismarck and calls it one of the great poems of World War II.<ref>Ferns, John. 'Love and War: George Whalley’s No Man An Island'''. http://georgewhalley.ca/gwp/node/64</ref> Though Whalley's poetry has been generally neglected, some critics assert he deserves renewed attention.Fortin, Marc Andre. 'No "ramshackle thinness" Within'. Rev. of The Complete Poems of George Whalley. Canadian Literature 232 (Spring 2017): 160–161.
Whalley nurtured the talents of younger poets. Michael Ondaatje, one of Whalley's students at Queen's University in the 1960s, reveals that Whalley helped him with a manuscript of his first volume of poetry, teaching him how to organize and structure a volume with deliberationGeorge Whalley: Remembrances Ed. Michael Moore. Kingston: Quarry Press, 1989. 120
Poetic Process After receiving his MA in English from Bishop's University for the thesis 'A Critique of Criticism' in 1948, Whalley began revising the thesis into a book-length study that was published in 1953 with the title Poetic Process: An Essay in Poetics. Central to the argument is that the thinking which goes into the making of poetry is as important as the thinking that goes into the study of science. While not attacking science or dismissing its procedures for investigating the world, Whalley seeks to reset the balance by showing that poetry and science are two different modes of knowing that make use of language and know reality in distinct, opposing ways. Whalley calls the poetic mind (contemplative) and the scientific mind (technical), a key distinction throughout the book.Whalley, George. Poetic Process. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953. xv. He acknowledges that individuals are poets at moments, not perpetually, and any person can become a poet. He also recognizes that great discoveries in poetry and science involve the whole of the person working in harmony.Poetic Process draws on the ideas of a wide range of writers, including Alfred North Whitehead, Dorothy Emmett, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Paul Valery, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Jacques Maritain, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Herbert Read, John Ruskin, Immanuel Kant, Sören Kierkegaard, and Henry Bergson, among others. But the synthesis Whalley produces makes the book as a whole distinct, not merely derivative of others' ideas.
In the introduction, Whalley explains that the book originated in a recognition that philosophy, psychology, criticism, and other disciplines of thought, had failed to adequately account for poetry.Whalley, George. Poetic Process. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953. xvi. He declares that heuristic inquiry, an alter, open-minded pursuit is required in place of methodological techniques Whalley, George. Poetic Process. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953. xxi. Whalley's notion of heuristic inquiry, in which criticism is defined as a 'getting-to-know', remains central to his thinking through the rest of his life. Years later, in a lecture given at Queen's University, Whalley revisited his view of heuristics by questioning predominant assumptions about knowing and rejecting the assumption that knowledge equates with analysis, mastery, and control of a studied object, instead calling for a way of knowing in which poetry is an instrument of inquiry and the poems tell us how to get to know.Whalley, George. 'Literature: an Instrument of Inquiry.' Humanities Association Review. 29. 3–4 (summer/fall 1978): 243–59. French version `La Littérature: un instrument de recherche', ibid., pp. 223–42.
In order to make a start on providing an adequate account of art, especially poetry, in Poetic Process, Whalley turns to writings and reflections written by artists: the second chapter, on Artists on Art, focuses on the Yeats and James Joyce and examines their thoughts on the experience of being poets and making poetry. Whalley repeatedly questions the fact and value distinction by arguing that value is inscribed in the very act of perception. A key element in the activity of making poetry, at its earliest stage, is the charge of feeling and value created with the poet's encounter with reality. The poem comes into being through a process of self-discovery (a discovery of the person and the poem) arising from the originating charge of feeling. After invoking Henry James's account of the poetic germ in his preface to The Spoils of Poynton and T.S. Eliot's analogy of contact catalysis in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Whalley uses quantum theory as a new analogy through which to understand the coming-into-being of a poem.Whalley, George. Poetic Process. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953. 86–91.
The centrality of imagination in perception and poetry is explored in detail in the middle chapters. In the fourth chapter Whalley compares the arguments made by Coleridge and Kant about the nature and quality of the imagination. In the fifth chapter Whalley develops his ideas about the importance of memory and feeling (the latter is distinct from emotion, which Whalley cautions is a dangerous element in life) in the process of image-making and in the poet's work of getting-to-know the other (person or thing). The latter is explained via John Keats's notion of negative capability, which Whalley sees as a rhythm in the mind of the poet that moves back and forth between sympathetic identifying and critical distancing. In later chapters he explores metaphor, symbol and myth, and music and rhythm in great detail and with much subtlety. Whalley's profound knowledge of music is revealed throughout those discussions. To substantiate his observations, Whalley reproduces passages of poetry from a significant number of writers: from John Donne to Yeats, from Shakespeare to T.S. Eliot.
The idea of Poetic, which is the opposite of Logic in Whalley's scheme, arises from Whalley's knowledge of the Greek roots of the word: poiein (to do or make); poiēma (a thing made – roughly poem); poiētes (a maker); poiēsis (the process or activity of making).Whalley, George. 'On Translating Aristotle's Poetics.' University of Toronto Quarterly 39.2 (1970): 77–106.
Coleridge scholarship Whalley was a leading expert on the writings of the poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whom he read and studied from the late 1930s until the end of his life. His PhD thesis was entitled S.T. Coleridge: Library Cormorant. He published over twenty scholarly essays and articles on Coleridge's poetry, letters, criticism, and marginalia and these appeared in numerous journals including Queen's Quarterly, University of Toronto Quarterly, and Review of English Studies. His second book of literary criticism was Coleridge and Sara Hutchinson and the Asra Poems, which was published in 1955. For thirty years, he collected and organized Coleridge's marginalia, which was published in six volumes as part of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Whalley edited the first two volumes and was named as a co-editor, with H.J. Jackson, for the other four, which were published after his death.
John Hornby and Edgar Christian writings