[2] On his return, he worked until his retirement as a geophysicist at the Dominion Magnetic Observatory at Agincourt, Ontario (now part of Toronto).
'"[5] One night in April 1928, after an evening's discussion of Canadian nationalism among friends, Ross wrote "practically all" of his most famous work, "North."
[5] "North" was a series of laconics based on Ross's memories of his summers in Northern Ontario years earlier.
He "confined his often brilliant verse-parodies to his letters and with the exception of Margaret Avison generally disliked the younger poets beginning to publish in the 'fifties.
Critic Barry Callaghan suggests that Ross wrote 'only when strenuously urged by an anthologist or literature student.
"[2] Later encouragement by Callaghan led to Ross's composing new poetry included in the posthumously published Shapes and Sounds (1968).
Shapes and sounds is a selection of Ross's poems edited by Souster and John Robert Colombo, with a memoir by Callaghan.
[2] "Though never widely read outside academic circles ... Ross had clearly thought out his attitudes toward poetry early on and diverged little from his initial position.
"[6] "He objected to both difficult and ornate verse and found the conventional romanticism of Canada's Confederation poets particularly unappealing.
In "On Australian Poetry" he "wrote that a poet is inevitably associated with a place and that the cosmopolitan doctrine as espoused by Smith was not tenable.
"In Ross's spare, ... narrow poems, the inquiring spirit of the New World seeks release from old sentiments, customs, and poetic conventions.... Ross seeks 'something of the sharper tang of Canada' in the surface reflections and dark shadows of pine-surrounded lakes, where reality is recognized as profound and mysterious.
"[6] The book "reveals a lesser-known side of Ross — the classicist and traditional metricist concerned not only with factual reality but also with spiritual truth.
"[2] Sonnets was meant to be more overtly philosophical than Laconics — which Ross thought would be better suited by the traditional form's longer lines — but ultimately he considered the book an experiment that failed: "Ross's private and somewhat trenchant nature, together with his diffidence toward publishing and the publicly lived literary life, caused him to be little known during his lifetime except to fellow poets.
"[6] "Ross's writing became of special importance in the 1950s and 1960s when new generations of Canadian poets sought their precursors in the modernist goals of restraint, precision, organic rhythm, and the factual image.