At the end of the working day, when the warehouse closed, father and son went to a cafe for a meal then to a show, or to the School of Arts in Hunter Street, where they sat on the upstairs veranda and took in the scene:[4][1] A cake-shop glowed across the way With a rainbow cake display; I never saw its keeper there, And never saw a customer, And yet there was activity High in the south-western sky: A bottle flashing on a sign Advertising someone's wine.

He also wrote short stories and essays – Tales Out of Bed (1944) and Australia and the Arts (1972) – as well as two children's books Gangles (1972) and Tobolino and the Amazing Football Boots (1974).

This mainstream publication established McCuaig as a highly original and versatile poet, modernist in the observational style, and a superb technician, master of 17th century conceits and madrigals.

[9] Douglas Stewart noted sales of thousands of copies were due in part to the Americans in Australia at the time buying up just about all the books in Sydney and clamouring for more.

The award was instigated by board member Geoffrey Dutton with support from Elizabeth Riddell and Barry Humphries in an attempt to gain recognition for McCuaig.

[8] In The innovators : the Sydney alternatives in the rise of modern art, literature and ideas, Macmillan, 1986 Geoffrey Dutton named Ronald McCuaig "Australia's First Modernist Poet".

He explained what he meant by modernism and McCuiag's part in it in a 1999 interview with Susan Hill in the Animist, January 1999[8] where he said Kenneth Slessor was usually considered to be the first Australian modernist poet but that McCauig was slightly ahead of him.

This was because Slessor was held back by the influence of Norman Lindsay who was a romanticist in an Australian group of writers and artists practising what Dutton called "fossilised 19th century diction" which had "no relation to the present day world".

[8] Neither Hill nor Dutton had been able to find any Australian influence on McCuaig, who was the first to break with the rural Georgian tradition and write directly about the modern world in an observational style.

McCuaig himself acknowledged his influences, having read Leavis's New Bearings in English Poetry, Eliot, Henry James, and Ezra Pound which he bought as first editions.

The Letter employs a savage, satirical tone to attack misogyny:[8] The opposite flat is dark and dumb, Yet I feel certain he will come Home to his love as drunk as ever And, in a slowly rising fever, Noting the whisky bottle gone, Will trip and curse and stumble on Into the bathroom, pull the chain, Fumble the cabinet, curse again; Will ask the slut where she has hid His toothbrush; blunder back to bed, Find his pyjamas tied in knots And give her, as he puts it, what's Coming to her.

In 1954 McCuaig was the editor of an anthology Australian Poetry published by Angus and Robertson[13] greeted upon its arrival by William T. Fleming in Meanjin as "frankly depressing".

Fleming finds, in comparison with overseas anthologies, the collection guilty of unimaginative use of rhyme, crude prosody, heavy-handed abstraction and fashionable obscurity.

She rates most highly Judith Wright's "Request to a Year" while finding some other offerings including the poem "Tower View, Maitland", "unprecise and mentally formless".

In his review of Australian Poetry, 1951-1952 selected by Kenneth Mackenzie (Angus and Robertson, 1952) he takes pleasure in the efforts of Rosemary Dobson, David Campbell, Hal Porter, Elizabeth Riddell, Douglas Stewart, Vivian Smith, Peter Hopeghood and Nancy Keesing; is ambivalent about Ray Mathew and Roland Robinson; and is only mildly critical of Rex Ingamells and Ian Mudie.

Despite recognition by his peers around the time of Vaudeville and later by Geoffrey Dutton, Kenneth Slessor, Douglas Stewart and Peter Kirkpatrick[1] McCuaig's reputation in Australian literature has been mixed.

When the collection QUOD Ronald McCuaig appeared in 1946 his Vaudeville era modernism was viewed as "satisfying poetry" but perhaps trivial by R T Dunlop in Southerly.

New Zealand born A. D. Moody, while senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne 1958-1964[17] in his 1961 Poetry Chronicle included McCuaig among the "anti-poetry versifiers who seem bent, whether out of ignorance or indifference or contempt, upon debasing their medium".

[18] In 2010 essayist Guy Rundle remarked McCuaig's greatest contribution to Australian poetry "may well be that he encouraged his friend and fellow journalist-poet Kenneth Slessor to a more ambitious aesthetic, thus helping him to bust out of his late Georgianism and into the full modernity of 'Five Bells".

[19] Laurence Bourke in Southerly (1992) rates McCuaig's body of work as represented by Selected Poems (1992) more highly than Rundle (who was anyway using him more as an example of creative drive unassisted by the state or the status quo and not critiquing him as such).