In 1936, Moraes became film censor for the Ministry of Education and Health. Two years later he won a British Council fellowship to study English language and literature at Oxford University. He abandoned his use of blank verse and free verse in favor of the sonnet, both the Italian form used in Portuguese poetry (two quatrains, two tercets) and the English form (three quatrains and a couplet). He was considered one of the most prominent of the "Generation of '45", a group of Brazilian writers in the 1930s and 1940s who rejected early modernism in favor of traditional forms and vocabulary. He is usually equated with his friend João Cabral de Melo Neto for the high technical skill of their poetry. However, if in Cabral's works technique served the depiction of objective reality, in Moraes's work technique served the depiction of the subjective mood of sexual love. The basic meter in Moraes's love poetry is the decasyllable, taken mostly from Camões's lyric poetry.