27 Facts About George Whalley

George Whalley was a scholar, poet, naval officer and secret intelligence agent during World War II, CBC broadcaster, musician, biographer, and translator.

George Whalley taught English at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario and was twice the head of the department.

George Whalley was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 1959.

George Whalley's brother, Peter Whalley, was a famous artist and cartoonist.

George Whalley served in the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve and was on active duty in the Royal Navy.

George Whalley served on warships, participated in the pursuit of the German battleship Bismarck, saved a life at sea and two lives from the surf at Praa Sands, worked as a naval intelligence officer, designed a marker buoy 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 George 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 George Whalley served on the staff of DNCXF Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay in the Mediterranean Sea and Sicily.

From July 1943 to March 1944 George Whalley was assigned to the Admiralty Deputy Director Operations Division.

George Whalley retired with the rank of commander in 1956.

George Whalley published two collections of poems that were written during and in the aftermath of World War Two.

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.

George Whalley calls the poetic mind and the scientific mind, a key distinction throughout the book.

George Whalley acknowledges that individuals are poets at moments, not perpetually, and any person can become a poet.

George Whalley recognizes that great discoveries in poetry and science involve the whole of the person working in harmony.

Years later, in a lecture given at Queen's University, George 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.

The latter is explained via John Keats's notion of negative capability, which George Whalley sees as a rhythm in the mind of the poet that moves back and forth between sympathetic identifying and critical distancing.

The idea of Poetic, which is the opposite of Logic in George Whalley's scheme, arises from George Whalley's knowledge of the Greek roots of the word: poiein ; poiema ; poietes ; poiesis.

George 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.

George Whalley 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.

George Whalley wrote Death in the Barren Ground, a 60-minute radio feature for CBC Radio, based on Christian's diary and the Hornby legend.

George Whalley wrote for and performed on radio and television from 1947 to 1972, most often for the CBC.

George Whalley wrote two dramatic features on David Jones, The Poems of David Jones and The Secret Princes, the writer and artist he long admired.

George Whalley's most noted radio dramatizations are If This Is a Man, a 140-minute adaptation of Stuart Woolf's translation of Primo Levi's Se questo e un uomo, and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a 135- minute adaptation of James Agee's book of the same title.

George Whalley made a major contribution to broadcasting in Canada, and his works were repeatedly nominated for the Italia Prize for radio.

George Whalley's adaptations of the novel Peter Abelard by Helen Waddle, Malory's Morte d'Arthur, James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and Primo Levi's If This Is A Man are among the most significant the finest pieces of writing ever made for radio.

George Whalley's radio broadcasts captured the ear and imagination of Michael Ondaatje, the notable Canadian writer, who identified his favourites as the adaptation of Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Primo Levi's If This Is A Man.