High Windows

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.