Philip Larkin(9 August 1922 – 2 December 1985)

Philip Larkin is widely regarded as one of the great English poets of the latter half of the twentieth century. His first book of poetry, The N

Larkin's poetry has been characterized as combining "an ordinary, colloquial style", "clarity", a "quiet, reflective tone", "ironic understatement" and a "direct" engagement with "commonplace experiences",while Jean Hartley summed his style up as a "piquant mixture of lyricism and discontent".

In 2010, a number of cultural events marked the quarter century since Larkin's death in 1985. Larkin's adopted home City of Kingston upon Hull is marking the anniversary with the Larkin 25 Festival including the public art event Larkin with Toads. The festival will culminate with the unveiling of a statue to Larkin inspired by the poem, 'The Whitsun Weddings'. Larkin's poems are appearing on Hull buses and a bus has been named 'Philip Larkin' in his honour by his biographer Sir Andrew Motion, a former English Lecturer at Larkin's workplace, the University of Hull. A compilation of Larkin's favourite jazz recordings has been released to mark the 25th anniversary of his death.

Larkin's earliest work showed the influence of Eliot, Auden and Yeats, and the development of his mature poetic identity in the early 1950s coincided with the growing influence on him of Thomas Hardy. The "mature" Larkin style, first evident in The Less Deceived, is "that of the detached, sometimes lugubrious, sometimes tender observer", who, in Hartley's phrase, looks at "ordinary people doing ordinary things". Larkin's mature poetic persona is notable for its "plainness and scepticism". Other recurrent features of his mature work are sudden openings and "highly-structured but flexible verse forms".

High Windows” consists of five quatrains; it has a variable metrical pattern and an irregular but discernible rhyme scheme (basically abab). Like many of Philip Larkin’s poems, “High Windows” is written in the first person with no attempt to separate himself from the speaker. “I write poems,” Larkin has said, “to preserve things I have seen/thought/felt (if I may so indicate a composite and complex experience) both for myself and others.”