John Magee, Pilot Poet, Author of 'High Flight'

The Spitfire Pilot Who Wrote a Famous Poem on the Magic Of Flying

Aug 30, 2009

World War II pilot John Gillespie Magee wrote 'High Flight' in 1941, at the age of 19. Three months later he was killed in a mid-air collision. So who was John Magee?

This first line of the poem ‘High Flight’ is famous, and the poem itself is perhaps the best known verse about aviation which exists. But although the poem is well known, far less is known about its author, John Gillespie Magee.

The Early Life of John Magee

The eldest son of an American father and an English mother, John Magee was born in Shanghai, China in 1922. He went to school at the American School in Nanking, but when he was nine years old he was sent to boarding school in England. As early as this he began to demonstrate an exceptional intelligence and an adventurous spirit. It was during his last year at this school that he began writing poetry.

In 1935, when he was 13, John was sent to Rugby’s famous public school in Warwickshire, England. Here, one of his contemporaries remembered him as “an audacious rule-breaker and pioneer”. His early attempts at writing verse aroused favourable comments amongst his teachers, and his headmaster, himself a gifted poet, took the boy under his wing. John became a close friend of the family, falling in love with the headmaster’s daughter Elinor. He continued to write poetry, and in 1939 won the coveted Rugby poetry prize. But he was a restless and unconventional free spirit, and began to question the rules and conventions of public school life. He produced a small book of his poems, but even this failed to satisfy him.

John’s Life in the RAF

His parents hoped that John would go to Yale University in the USA, but by the spring of 1940 John was becoming increasingly disturbed by the Second World War, and he decided to join the Royal Canadian Air Force. He found the life more mundane than he had expected, but he became caught up in the excitement of learning to fly. He described an aeroplane as “a flash of silver slanting the skies; the hum of a deep-voiced motor”. It was clearly the voice of the poet who would write ‘High Flight’.

John flew solo after a mere six hours of instruction. In June 1941 he passed his ‘Wings Test’, coming second in his class. It was a proud moment for the man who had a passion for flying above all else. John first flew the Spitfire in August 1941, and in company with most pilots, he loved the aircraft. Soon afterwards, he scribbled on an envelope the worlds of what was to become the most famous flying poem of all time, ending with the memorable line so well-known to pilots everywhere:

The Death of the Pilot Poet

A few months later, John was flying through a bank of cloud when he collided with another aircraft on a training flight from the RAF College at Cranwell. The circumstances surrounding the crash were not clear, but both pilots were killed. John Gillespie Magee was just 19.

John Magee may have lived a very short life, but his poems live on. Indeed, in his speech to the American people following the space shuttle ‘Challenger’ disaster in 1986, President Reagan chose to quote a few lines of ‘High Flight’ in an effort to lesson the sense of shock suffered by a grieving nation.

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