High Windows is a collection of poems by English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 poet Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin

Philip Arthur Larkin, CH, CBE, FRSL is widely regarded as one of the great English poets of the latter half of the twentieth century...

, and was published in 1974 by Faber and Faber Limited. The readily available paperback version was first published in Britain

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 in 1979. The collection is the last publication of new poetry by Larkin before his death in 1985, and it contains some of his most famous poems, including the title piece, "High Windows", "Dublinesque", and "This Be The Verse

This Be The Verse

"This Be The Verse" is a lyric poem in three verses of four iambic tetrameter on an alternating rhyme scheme, by the English poet Philip Larkin...

".The collection contains themes presented in his earlier collections, though the tone of the poems caused critics to suggest the book is darker and more "socially engaged" than his earlier volumes.
It is currently on the AQA AS level English Literature syllabus.

Poems

The volume contains 24 poems:

Sequence	Poem title	Completion date
1	To the Sea	6910Oct 1969 (best known date)
2	Sympathy in White Major	670831 Aug 1967
3	The Trees	670602 Jun 1967
4	Livings: I, II, III	711210 Dec 1971
5	Forget What Did	710806 Aug 1971
6	High Windows	670212 Feb 1967
7	Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel	660520 May 1966
8	The Old Fools	730112 Jan 1973
9	Going, Going	720125 Jan 1972
10	The Card-Players	700506 May 1970
11	The Building	720209 Feb 1972
12	Posterity	680617 Jun 1968
13	Dublinesque	700606 Jun 1970
14	Homage to a Government	690110 Jan 1969
15	This Be The Verse This Be The Verse "This Be The Verse" is a lyric poem in three verses of four iambic tetrameter on an alternating rhyme scheme, by the English poet Philip Larkin...	7104Apr 1971 (best known date)
16	How Distant	651124 Nov 1965
17	Sad Steps	680424 Apr 1968
18	Solar	641104 Nov 1964
19	Annus Mirabilis	670716 Jul 1967
20	Vers de Société	710519 May 1971
21	Show Saturday	731203 Dec 1973
22	Money	730219 Feb 1973
23	Cut Grass	710603 Jun 1971
24	The Explosion	700105 Jan 1970

Critical reception

Clive James, in As of this writing, describes High Windows as Larkin's bleakest volume of poetry, though he does admit that there are aspects of the poetry that contain the humour found in Larkin's earlier books of poetry. James suggests that Larkin has never liked the idea of a poet "Developing" and that Larkin himself remains the same throughout his career as a poet. High Windows, in James's opinion, shows that Larkin simply strives, with the addition of each poem, to state more clearly the same principles shown by his early works and concludes that "The total impression of High Windows is of despair made beautiful."

Blurb

The following is the blurb from the published book.

"When Philip Larkin's High Windows first appeared, Kingsley Amis

Kingsley Amis

Sir Kingsley William Amis, CBE was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, various short stories, radio and television scripts, along with works of social and literary criticism...

 spoke for a large and loyal readership when he wrote:

'Larkin's admirers need only be told that he is as good as ever here, if not slightly better.' Like Betjeman

John Betjeman

Sir John Betjeman, CBE was an English poet, writer and broadcaster who described himself in Who's Who as a "poet and hack".He was a founding member of the Victorian Society and a passionate defender of Victorian architecture...

 and Hardy

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy, OM was an English novelist and poet. While his works typically belong to the Naturalism movement, several poems display elements of the previous Romantic and Enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural.While he regarded himself primarily as a...

, Larkin is a poet who can move a large audience — to laughter and to tears — without betraying the highest artistic standards."