There are many reasons to welcome a collected edition of James K. Baxter's letters: it certainly tells us a lot more about the poet than we knew before – ‘we’ being the general public, that is. The revelation in these letters that Baxter was a believer in marital rape is a pretty hard fact to get past, though, even if he was boasting or trying to shock his correspondent: another women whom he admitted wanting to seduce. He comes across as quite a silly man, to be honest: or at least that's the most charitable way I can read these letters. For all his talent and intelligence, he seems never to have regarded other people as fully there. He tried hard, and he certainly wrote some beautiful poems, but there was something wrong with him, even so. The worst response to this collection would be to say that ‘that's what people thought then’ – only stupid or evil people have ever condoned rape, in any way, shape or form. And, yes, ‘rape’ is the word Baxter uses (though I note it's not included in the otherwise very full index).
