George Whalley, Poems 1939-1944

Michael DiSanto (Algoma University College)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.1.2: Canadian Writing and Culture (Anglophone): The Twentieth Century and beyond, 1900-present.
Vol. editors: Claire-Marie Brisson (Harvard University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Glen Nichols (Mount Allison University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Wendy Roy (University of Saskatchewan), Denis Salter (McGill University), Karis Shearer (University of British Columbia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1946

Places

Canada (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Poem collection

Resources

Poems 1939-1944 and No Man An Island, the two books of poems George Whalley published during his life, are closely connected. The works in both collections draw from a great outpouring of verse Whalley produced during World War II, in which he served as a naval officer and a secret intelligence agent, and its immediate aftermath, when he returned to Canada and joined the faculty of Bishop’s University. In identifying Whalley as “one of Canada’s most distinguished poets”, David Lewis writes that “his war poems display a mature range and scope that is unrivalled by any of the other second-world-war poets [Lewis names Keith Douglas and Randall Jarrell] with whom he clearly deserves equal mention” (Lewis 1987, 731, 732). Of the sixteen verses in Poems 1939-1944, eight are reprinted in the larger selection of forty...

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991 words

Citation: DiSanto, Michael. "Poems 1939-1944". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 29 November 2013 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=33205, accessed 09 June 2026.]

George Whalley, Poems 1939-1944

Dates

Places

Genres and Modes

Resources

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