Despite setbacks, he kept reading, writing, and cataloging.

Sometimes we don’t even know we’re preparing for our big project. At this point in J.A. Baker’s life he was back in Chelmsford, unemployed. But…

He was not disheartened. As far as he was concerned his real work was going very well: in the three months between returning from Roffey and starting work in London he had read almost sixty books; such ‘aesthetic stimulus’, as he called it, was far more important to his long term goals. Now that he had time on his hands, he was keen to devote it to his literary projects. Days and nights were spent feverishly reading and writing.

He built up his personal library. Something he’d continue to do through his lifetime:

By the end of January 1946, Baker’s library had grown to remarkable levels. Dozens of books of poetry had been consumed as he made his way through the canonical writers of the nineteenth century, including Walt Whitman, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Robert Browning (as well as translations of the French and German poets Rimbaud and Rilke), and moved on to modern writers: John Masefield, T.S. Eliot (whom he had grown to like, despite not having been offered a job at Faber), Cecil Day Lewis and Stephen Spender. He discovered a love for the lilting style of the ‘ultra-modern’ Dylan Thomas, whom he thought perfectly mirrored his own memories of childhood and love of the countryside.

and Baker practiced his writerley scales:

Exercise books were filled with notes on form and metre, and hundreds of poems carefully copied out. Study was an outlet: it helped him to stave off bouts of depression that continued to threaten.

Saunders, Hetty. My House of Sky: The life and work of J.A. Baker. Lower Dairy, Toller Fratrum, Dorset: Little Toller Books, 2017.