Since his death, Larkin has been attacked by some critics for his reactionary opinions and misogynistic attitudes. Lisa Jardine, for instance, describes him as ‘a casual habitual racist, and an easy misogynist. Not to mention a malicious gossip, who relished savagely caricaturing fellow authors and critics, and abusing acquaintances.’ She describes the cultural frame within which Larkin writes as one which ‘takes racism and sexism for granted as crucially a part of the British national heritage’. Peter Ackroyd (writing of Larkin in a way that strikingly recalls Larkin's own words about his mother) refers to ‘that drab monologue of misery and self-pity which was to fill his letters and poems’, claims that he was essentially a minor poet ‘who for purely local and temporary reasons acquired a large reputation’, and asserts that ‘by the end of his life he had become a foul-mouthed bigot’. Not many of the attacks on Larkin's reactionary views are as virulent as these (though one correspondent in the Library Association Record did suggest that he should be banned!); but a popular view has grown up, often among those who have read little or none of his work, that it is vitiated by hatred, spite, and envy. To ask if there is any truth in this view can provide a starting-point for discussing some of the poems in High Windows.

‘I've always been right-wing,’ said Larkin in an interview. ‘It's difficult to say why, but not being a political thinker, I suppose I identify the Right with certain virtues (thrift, hard work, reverence, desire to preserve) and the Left with certain vices’ (RW 52). This is here expressed with the restraint appropriate to a public statement, but in his letters he is often fiercer. ‘My simple cure for “unemployment” (no such thing really) is to abolish unemployment benefits. If you don't want chaps to do a thing, then don't pay them to do it.’ Or – even fiercer, even hysterical – ‘I find the “state of the nation” quite terrifying. In ten years time we shall all be cowering under our beds as rampaging hordes of blacks steal anything they can lay hands on’ (SL 646, 755).