Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16977 in Books
• Published on: 1979-10-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 42 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Philip Larkin ponders ordinary lives in his poems: a Saturday show; travelling salesmen; young love. At the seaside "Everything crowds under the low horizon: / Steep beach, blue water, towels, read bathing caps, / The small hushed waves' repeated fresh collapse / Up the warm yellow sand". There's an almost Shakespearian obsession with ageing and passing time in the poems collected in High Windows. "What do they think has happened, the old fools, to make them like this?…Why aren't they screaming?" Larkin asks of the elderly. His answer: "Well, we shall find out." In the titular poem he watches young lovers and wonders "if anyone looked at me, forty years back, and thought, That'll be the life". But it's hard to see into the future or the past: you have to strain, as if looking through a high window, and even then you may only get a glimpse of light through the "sun-comprehending glass."

High Windows was first published in 1974 and some critics disliked Larkin's work for its lack of experiment and familiar subject matter. Yet even at its most traditional, Larkin's writing can be striking as, in "This Be The Verse", it encapsulates prosaic truths with plain language and gentle wit:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

Customer Reviews

One of the greatest collection of poetry in English
It is not merely because it is his last collection that High Windows shoulders the burden of Larkin's artistic reputation: it is also his greatest collection.

This volume is as maddeningly thin as it is beautiful, and despite containing Larkin's final published pieces, it serves as a splendid introduction to the poet.

'This Be The Verse', for instance, perhaps most typifies (and gratifies) the popular image of Larkin: a poem with doggerel beginnings, which emerges into the splendour of a transcendent final stanza ('Man hands on misery to man...'), only to drop once again into the doggerel voice for the final line ('And don't have any kids yourself'). One of the most honed aspects of Larkin's genius was his manipulation of different tones and registers, over which he shows a Prospero-like control in this collection.

If, as has been suggested, Larkin was shooting prospective glances at his own posthumous reputation in High Windows, 'Posterity' suggests it was not without the same withering humour he displayed throughout his career, both as a poet and in his journalism.

Now that the urgency of the Larkin debate has thoroughly died down (his 'political incorrectness' was for a while regarded with a seriousness comparable only to Heidegger's Nazism), it is a perfect time to read this poetry as poetry: as the epitome of Larkin's poetic insights, and as the greatest work of one of the last truly original English poets.

Makes me feel old (not necessarily a bad thing)
I have a curious relationship with this collection. Quite often I find myself disagreeing with Larkin's views as much as I agree. However I cannot help but admire the majestic clarity of his verse. Nowhere is this illustrated better than in the title poem, which begins with Larkin at his most cynical and vulgar yet ends with a baffling but soaring evocation of emptiness.

Larkin leaves the best to last
High Windows is the final publication from the late poet. It is indeed worthy of consideration as his finest work. The subltlety, style and insightfulness of Whitsun Weddings and The Less Deceived are there as are the Larkin hallmarks of masterly control of rhythmn and rhyme in addition to memorable lines of poetic excellence. The collection also hints at a new development in the poet's work through a celebration of the creative life force which exists somewhere beyond present reality: the title poem High Windows encompasses this celebratory tone. The High Windows and their "sun comprehending glass" remind the poet a depth of existence beyond the coarseness of the physical world. This is an uncharacteristic acknowledgement of the spiritual from a poet who trades on his cynical, morbid interpretation of life as one breath away from the vast emptiness of death. The later Larkin seems to realise, however briefly, that High Windows are portals to a level of existence which just might offer hope and be worthy of celebration.