George Whalley, No Man An Island

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: Sarah Henzi (Simon Fraser University), Kerry Myler (Newman University), Glen Nichols (Mount Allison University), Wendy Roy (University of Saskatchewan), Denis Salter (McGill University), Karis Shearer (University of British Columbia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1948

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, …

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990 words

Citation: DiSanto, Michael. "No Man An Island". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 29 November 2013 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=33206, accessed 23 November 2024.]

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