High Windows

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1974

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Historical Context

Philip Larkin composed “High Windows” in 1967—the height of the 1960s’ cultural revolution known as The Summer of Love. The decade before was famously conventional. Following the tumult of the American Great Depression and the subsequent second world war, the 1950s was a period of wealth and stability for those who were white and middle class. In the 1950s, America and England celebrated a stable, traditionalist persona: white picket fences, well-dressed children, white-collar husbands, and demure housewives. However, this ideal painted over many of society’s underlying inequalities: institutionalized racism, oppression of women, and a homogenizing status quo. After a decade defined by this rigid veneer of propriety, the 1960s saw the eruption of change: feminism, civil rights, the sexual revolution, new and transgressive aesthetics in fashion and music, and more.

The 1960s was defined by youth culture and its new and open experiments with drugs, sex, Eastern cultural influences, and bohemian living. In order to understand the impact of the socio-sexual “paradise” (Line 4) Larkin describes in “High Windows,” it is important to understand the impact of both medical and feminist social breakthroughs of the time. While many of these social shifts were fomented in American culture, their impact on Larkin’s England was potent—particularly as the world became increasingly globalized. The sexual revolution of the 1960s is the result of no single cause, but the feminist pushback against the repressive 1950s housewife-role certainly led to a reclamation of sex as more than just a reproductive act for married couples. In addition, the medical advances in contraception and their subsequent availability to the public meant sex could be recreational without the potentially life-altering reproductive consequences. In fact, Larkin wrote this poem the year that the pill became available to the British public at large: 1967.

So, when Larkin’s speaker sees a young couple in 1967, it is entirely reasonable for him to “guess he’s fucking her” (Line 2) and that, moreover, they are using the newly available contraception: “Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm” (Line 3). The old matrimonial “Bonds and gestures” have been “pushed to one side” (Line 6) in the wake of this cultural revolution. Larkin’s poem celebrates the change, while questioning its supposed existential impact. The more things change, the poem seems to claim, the more they stay the same.

Literary Context

Philip Larkin’s poem is characterized by its almost conversational clarity, its casual formal traditionalism, and its personal content. Like his coeval peers in Confessionalism, Larkin wrote poems about himself and his intimate thoughts and experiences. Unlike the Confessionals, however, Larkin’s poems were not driven by surprising imagery, nor did they partake in the postmodern play of complicated syntax. While Larkin’s themes and poetic voice remained intimately personal, the tone with which he expressed these themes was grounded in a kind of pessimistic matter-of-factness. Larkin’s poetry is too distinctly English to be categorized within American poetic movements.

In fact, although Larkin wrote largely in solitude and without manifestos or designs to found any poetic school, his work did come to be considered a key part of The Movement. The Movement was not founded by poets but instead coined by critics who grouped several poets of the time based on their poetic and theoretical similarities. Larkin, his friend Kingsley Amis, and other notable British poets like Donald Davie and Elizabeth Jennings celebrated a certain type of poetic traditionalism in their work. The Movement was as a uniquely British school of writers who wrote against the currents of Modernism before them (exemplified in the rhetorical difficulty and obfuscation of poets T.S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas) and the experiments of the Postmoderns with whom they were contemporaries. Larkin, like his fellow Movement poets, believed in a return to understandable, clear poetry that frankly dealt with the (especially unspoken) existential problems everyone experiences. For poets of The Movement, the tradition of English poetry did not need to be overturned or fragmented, but simply updated.