 All of these publications and more, were based on his interest in the Ulster rhyming weaver poets of the 19th century, such as Henry MacDonald Flecher, David Herbison, Alexander MacKenzie, James MacKowen, and James Orr.Hewitt himself felt that his juvenilia ended with the poem "Ireland" (1932), which he placed at the start of his "Collected Poems" (1968), and indeed it is more complex than most of his earlier work, and begins his lifelong preoccupation with bleak landscapes of bog and rock; with exile, and with the nature of belonging.The 1930s was a period of transition in Hewitt's poetry, one in which he began seriously to address the tortured history of his native province, and the contradictions between his love for the people and the landscape, his inspiration in the radical dissenting tradition, and the bloody, fratricidal conflicts which scar Northern Ireland to this day.