High Flight is a 1941 sonnet written by war poet John Gillespie Magee Jr. and inspired by his experiences as a fighter pilot of the Royal Canadian Air Force in World War II. Magee began writing the poem on 18 August, while stationed at No. 53 OTU outside London, and mailed a completed manuscript to his family on 3 September, three months before he died in a training accident. Originally published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, it was widely distributed when Magee became one of the first post-Pearl Harbor American casualties of the war on 11 December, after which it was exhibited at the American Library of Congress in 1942. Owing to its gleeful and ethereal portrayal of aviation, along with its allegorical interpretation of death and transcendence, the poem has been featured prominently in aviation memorials across the world, including that of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.

"Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air....

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark, or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
– Put out my hand, and touched the face of God."

While piloting a Spitfire Mk I, Magee reached 33,000 feet (10,000 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.

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), with whom Magee had trained.^{[citation needed]}

Magee enclosed the poem in a letter to his parents, dated 3 September 1941. His father, then curate of 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.

Dr. Oliver Tearle writes that Magee could have been inspired by 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." High Flight could have been further influenced by the effects of 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.

The last words of High Flight — "...and touched the face of God" — can also be found in a poem by Cuthbert Hicks published three years earlier in Icarus: An Anthology of the Poetry of Flight. The last two lines in Hicks' poem The Blind Man Flies read:

For I have danced the streets of heaven,
And touched the face of God.