After a period of unemployment and rejection of a volume of his poetry by the Hogarth Press,Maggie Fergusson, p. 170. Brown did a postgraduate study on Gerard Manley Hopkins, although such work was not to his taste.George Mackay Brown, p. 173. This provided some occupation and income until 1964, when a volume of poetry, The Year of the Whale, was accepted.Maggie Fergusson, pp. 173 and 179.
