Stewart's enrolment in a teaching course at Sydney University was abandoned before his second year for the less certain but more enticing career of a poet. "I found the courses ... arid and boring to distraction," he recalls. His ambition to become a poet gathered momentum during high school and after completing his final year, and without university or full-time employment as a distraction, he embarked upon his chosen career path, spending many hours at the Sydney Public Library copying his favourite poems in long hand. In a letter to Michael Heyward, he wrote: "The period between leaving Sydney University and joining the Army was that period during which I worked through many modern influences, getting lost in the wilderness, stuck up blind alleys, and finding my way out of them".