Jerusalem Sonnets 1
That Baxter couldn’t finish the sequence
is surely because he saw that the way to finish a work where the subject was so much his shortcomings would be to not be able to: this especially when the fictional weakness enabled him to signal the principal real one, his vanity – at least, a 39 sonnet sequence is hardly the demons of writer’s block for most poets; or, indeed, Baxter didn’t need to be smitten with his own genius to know he’d hit the ball out of the park, and was regretting only being able to manage a 39 poem masterpiece.
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