[6] Baxter began writing poetry at the age of seven, and he accumulated a large body of technically accomplished work both before and during his teenage years.

[1] In 1940, Baxter began attending King's High School, Dunedin, where he was bullied, because of his differences to other students (in personality, voice and background), his lack of interest in team sports and his family's pacifism.

[4]: 14–15  His older brother, Terence, was a conscientious objector like their father and was detained in military camps between 1941 and 1945 for his refusal to fight in World War II.

[6][4]: 15 In 1943, Baxter's final year of high school, he wrote to a friend that he was considering becoming a lawyer, but was "not decided on it": "If I should find it possible to live by writing I would gladly do so.

After his eighteenth birthday on 29 June 1944, like his father and brother, Baxter registered as a conscientious objector, citing "religious and humanitarian" grounds.

[4]: 20 Baxter failed to complete his course work at the University of Otago due to increasing alcoholism, and was forced to take a range of odd jobs from 1945–7.

[10] In 1948 Baxter married Jacquie Sturm at St John's Cathedral, Napier, and his developing interest in Christianity culminated in his joining the Anglican church and being baptised during that same year.

[3] In late 1954, Baxter joined Alcoholics Anonymous, successfully achieving sobriety, and in 1955, he finally graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Victoria University College.

[1] In 1957 Baxter took a course in Roman Catholicism and his collection of poems In Fires of No Return, published in 1958 by Oxford University Press, was influenced by his new faith.

[14] Through the late 50s and 60s Baxter visited the Southern Star Abbey, a Cistercian monastery at Kopua near Central Hawke's Bay.

[17] In the late 1950s and 1960s Baxter became a powerful and prolific writer of both poems and drama, and it was through his 1958 radio play Jack Winter's Dream that he became internationally known.

[18] The first half of the 1960s also saw, however, Baxter struggling to make ends meet on a postman's wage, having resigned from the Department of Education in 1963 and refused to take work as a schoolmaster.

[1][4]: 55  However, in 1966 Baxter's critically acclaimed collection of poems Pig Island Letters was published in which his writing found a new level of clarity.

[1] While planning his move to Jerusalem, in early 1969, Baxter spent some time in Grafton, Auckland where he set up a drop-in centre for drug addicts, acting on the same principles as Alcoholics Anonymous.

[17] He lived a sparse and isolated existence and made frequent trips to the nearby cities where he worked with the poor and spoke out against what he perceived as a social order that sanctions poverty.

His poems of this time, published in his final collections Jerusalem Sonnets (1970) and Autumn Testament (1972), have a conversational style but speak strongly of his social and political convictions.

[1] The commune's popularity grew, in part due to an article in the Sunday Times newspaper in June 1970, and by mid-1970 around 25 people were living in the community.

[4]: 107  The population increased to 40 permanent residents by May 1971, mostly aged between 16 and 25, living in three abandoned houses, and the number of visitors was estimated by Baxter at about a thousand over the year.

[4]: 110  The five goals Baxter devised for the commune were: "To share one's goods; To speak the truth, not hiding one's heart from others; To love one another and show it by the embrace; To take no job where one has to lick the boss's arse; To learn from the Maori side of the fence".

One letter in the collection revealed that in 1960, Baxter confided to another woman that he raped his wife, Jacquie Sturm, after she expressed low interest in sex.

[27] Paul Millar, a Baxter scholar and personal friend of Sturm, who had been appointed as her literary executor after her death, cautioned against reading the letter as turning Sturm into a victim: "Leaving apart how appalling this letter is – a betrayal on so many levels from the brutal act described, the lack of shame in the description, and the profound betrayal of trust – its publicity is once again putting Jacquie in a subordinate position to Baxter, a bit player in his narrative.

"[26] Mark Williams, emeritus Professor of English at Victoria University, said the admission was consistent with what he knew of Baxter: "He observed his own adulteries objectively as part of the fallen human condition.

"[27] Baxter and Sturm's great-grandson, Jack McDonald, wrote that the account was "sickening" and that he believed his great-grandmother "would never have wanted these brutal details made public".

[16] An allegation of attempted rape followed when, in April 2019, the New Zealand news outlet Stuff published an account by Rosalind Lewis (Ros), who had been at the Jerusalem commune in 1970 when she was aged 18 years.

"[28] Criticism of Baxter's poetry has generally focussed on his incorporation of European myths into his New Zealand poems, his interest in Māori culture and language, and the significance of his religious experiences and conversion to Roman Catholicism.

His biographer Paul Millar said: "If, at times, Baxter appears to evaluate New Zealand society harshly, his judgements are always from the perspective of one intimately involved in the social process.

Schmidt also commented on Baxter's influences, noting that his work drew upon Dylan Thomas and W. B. Yeats; then on Louis MacNeice and Robert Lowell.

On the other hand, Smith said that Baxter "remained, disappointingly, over-intoxicated with his own energy, and never convincingly manifested qualities of restraint to balance it.