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.
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.
He served on warships (including HMS Tartar and HMS Ceres), participated in the pursuit of the German battleship Bismarck, 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 March to July 1943 Whalley served on the staff of DNCXF Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay in the Mediterranean Sea and Sicily.
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.
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.
[10] 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.
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 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.
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.
[12] 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.
Whalley's interest in the story of John Hornby began before World War II when he read Unflinching, the edition of Edgar Christian's diary that was published in 1937.
In the 1950s, Whalley began a careful study by collecting the extant materials, contacting the Christian family and those who knew Hornby and/or possessed relevant documents.
[14] Whalley's profound sensitivity to tragedy in life and literature, underlying his writings on John Hornby and Edgar Christian and informing many of his poems, was shaped through the events he witnessed during the Second World War and his longtime involvement with Aristotle's text, both in the translating of the Poetics and in the studying of it with students (who were given typescript copies of Whalley's work-in-progress) that participated in his Literary Criticism seminar at Queen's University.
Single Form (1966) and To an Unknown Country (1967), were both features dedicated to Dag Hammarskjöld, the second Secretary-General of the United Nations who died in 1961.
Whalley made a major contribution to broadcasting in Canada, and his works were repeatedly nominated for the Italia Prize for radio.
[15] 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.
[16] 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.
[17] Much of Whalley's criticism – and whatever might be called his philosophy – revolves around his contemplation of the central place of language in a community and in an individual's knowing and feeling.