While in Japan and after his return to England, where he took up a post at University College Hull, he continued to publish poetry, fiction and criticism.

His works include The Course of English Classicism from the Tudor to Victorian Age (1930), a study of classicism in British art; Yofuku, or, Japan in Trousers (1931), a travel book about his experiences in Japan which was critical of aspects of Japanese culture; and A Hundred Years of English Literature (1959), a survey of the literature of Britain, the British Empire and the United States.

[2] His father, Sydney Howard Vines, was Sherardian Professor of Botany at the University of Oxford and named his son after William Sherard.

[8] Reviewing The Kaleidoscope in Poetry, Marion Strobel commented that the volume "springs fearlessly from one subject to another" and prefers "a harsh simplicity" to "sensuous cadences"or "beauty of wording".

[2] Vines' arrival in Japan was simultaneous with that of fellow English poet Edmund Blunden, who taught at the Imperial University of Tokyo.

[8] A reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement wrote of The Pyramid: "[Vines'] despair is significant because it is so intellectually positive ... His verse is remarkable for the piercing violence with which it expresses the disenchantment of one for whom the world has become divested of value.

"[8] Movements in Modern English Poetry and Prose, composed mostly of lectures Vines had given and written with Japanese students in mind, was published in 1927.

"[16] While in Japan he also became friends with the South African author William Plomer, who spent the years 1926–29 there and described Vines as "a poet of distinction", albeit "neglected ... by a reading public too easily hypnotized by the parrot-like repetition of names and too incurious to find things out for itself".

[18] That year he published a further volume of poetry, Triforium, which featured works that had previously appeared in the Japanese literary magazine Mita Bungaku.

[28] A reviewer in Pacific Affairs criticised Vines' focus on the aspects of Japanese life he found less pleasant, and asserted that "the informed reader, particularly one who has lived in Japan," would find it incomplete and one-sided, concluding "it is hard to imagine any considerable public for the book or any way in which that public could be served by its appearance.