| Summary: | In this article, I propose a theorisation of what I term 'the writer's block subgenre', a literary category comprising creative works shaped by and engaging with the condition of writer's block. Drawing primarily on the theoretical framework of Edmund Bergler, credited with first coining the term 'writer's block', I argue that in certain cases, this condition proves so enduring and traumatic for the artist that it can become, paradoxically, the idea or plot they previously struggled to find. Through close readings of Samuel Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan', Keith Douglas's 'The "bête noire" fragments' and Ted Hughes's 'The thought fox', I examine how these poems engage with creative inhibition and why they qualify as quintessential examples of the writer's block subgenre.
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