Stokes's first major achievements began after he met modernist poet, Ezra Pound in November 1926, and after he started analysis with Melanie Klein, in January 1930.
In the contemporary art of the 1930s Stokes found these 'carving' qualities in the work of Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, and Henry Moore, whose Modernism he championed in articles in The Spectator.
In 1938 Stokes married[3] and moved with his artist wife, Margaret Mellis, to live in Carbis Bay, [St Ives, Cornwall] where their son Telfer was born.
Meanwhile—through bringing Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, and, with them, Naum Gabo, to St Ives in 1939 – Stokes became the main catalyst of the town's transformation into an internationally acclaimed centre of modern art.
At the same time Stokes helped and contributed papers to the 'Imago Group' which met regularly for nearly eighteen years to discuss applications of psychoanalysis to philosophy, politics, ethics, and aesthetics.