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High Flight
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== Creation == [[File:Spitfire - Duxford After Hours.jpg|thumb|[[Supermarine Spitfire]] like the one flown by John Magee]] While piloting a [[Supermarine Spitfire Variants|Spitfire Mk I]], Magee reached {{Convert|33,000|ft|m}} during a training flight over [[Wales]] sometime in August 1941. He was impressed by the speed and agility of the aircraft, and moved by the experience of flying at that altitude. He wrote to his parents that he completed the poem soon after finishing training that day.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Cole |first=Roger |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/849197160 |title=High Flight: The Life and Poetry of Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee |date=2014 |isbn=978-0-9571163-6-8 |publisher=Fighting High Publishing |location=[[Hitchin]], Hertfordshire, England |oclc=849197160}}</ref> The first person to read Magee's poem later that same day in the officers' mess was fellow Pilot Officer Michael Henry Le Bas (later [[Air Vice-Marshal]] M. H. Le Bas, Air Officer Commanding [[No. 1 Group RAF]]<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.rafweb.org/Biographies/LeBas_MH.htm |title=M H Le Bas |website=Rafweb.org |access-date=27 January 2016}}</ref>), with whom Magee had trained.{{citation needed|date=March 2020}} Magee enclosed the poem in a letter to his parents, dated 3 September 1941. His father, then curate of [[St. John's Episcopal Church, Lafayette Square (Washington, D.C.)|Saint John's Episcopal Church]] in Washington, DC, reprinted it in church publications. The poem became more widely known through the efforts of [[Archibald MacLeish]], then [[Librarian of Congress]], who included it in an exhibition of poems called "Faith and Freedom" at the [[Library of Congress]] in February 1942. The [[manuscript]] copy of the poem remains at the Library of Congress.<ref>{{Cite web|year=1943|title=John Magee papers|url=https://lccn.loc.gov/mm79005423|website=|publisher=[[Library of Congress]]}}</ref> === Inspirational sources === Dr. Oliver Tearle writes that Magee could have been inspired by [[Romantic poetry|romantic poems]] that imagined the sensation of flying before humans first successfully flew. The poet described his flight as supernatural, surrealistic and limitless, while it concerns an actual flight in an actual flying machine. Tearle stated that the poem could be seen as a symbol of technological progress, as its author had transcended the confinements of nature in real life: the aeroplane has allowed humankind to defy the limit of being bound to Earth, soar higher than any bird, and "become almost a god himself."<ref name=":0" /> ''High Flight'' could have been further influenced by the effects of [[Hypoxia (medical)|hypoxia]], which Magee described experiencing on one of his flights in his [[logbook]], and perhaps an aviation-specific type of [[spatial disorientation]] that makes pilots feel dissociated with their aircraft's controls.<ref name=":1" /> The last words of ''High Flight'' β "...and touched the face of God" β can also be found in a poem by Cuthbert Hicks published three years earlier in ''Icarus: An Anthology of the Poetry of Flight''. <!-- (Macmillan, London, 1938), compiled by R de la Bere and three flight cadets of the [[Royal Air Force College Cranwell|Royal Air Force College, Cranwell]]. --> The last two lines in Hicks' poem ''The Blind Man Flie''s read: {{blockquote | quote = For I have danced the streets of heaven,<br />And touched the face of God. }} The anthology includes the poem "New World" by G. W. M. Dunn, which contains the phrase "on laughter-silvered wings". Dunn wrote of "the lifting mind", another phrase that Magee used in ''High Flight'', and refers to "the shouting of the air", in comparison to Magee's line, "chased the shouting wind." Another line by Magee, "The high untrespassed sanctity of space", closely resembles "Across the unpierced sanctity of space", which appears in the anthology in the poem "Dominion over Air" (previously published in the ''RAF College Journal'').
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