still convinced of the inevitability of war with Germany after Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933: he told his father in 1934, "I want to be in the army from the first day that Britain goes to war". He suffered a spiritual crisis when he heard of the Night of the Long Knives in July 1934, which shattered his vision of German culture. He later recalled that he sat for hours in a state of shock: "So it had all been illusion, all fantasy, all a self-created myth ... The spiritual homeland had not been a spiritual homeland after all, since nothing can be a homeland, let alone a spiritual homeland, where there is no justice, where justice does not reign". In 1935, Powell met the German–Jewish classical scholar Paul Maas in Venice, who confirmed Powell's belief about the nature of Nazi Germany, and he had a "furious" argument with an adherent of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, who had tried unsuccessfully to persuade Powell of Mosley's merits. He spent his time at Trinity teaching and supervising undergraduates, and worked on a lexicon of Herodotus. In January 1936 Powell delivered an address to the Classical Association on "The War and its Aftermath in their Influence on Thucydidean Studies", which was published in The Times. Since 1932 Powell had been working on the Egyptian manuscripts of J. Rendel Harris and his translation from the Greek into English was published in 1937. Powell's first collection of poems, First Poems, was published in 1937 and was influenced by Housman. The Times Literary Supplement reviewed them and said they possessed to a degree "the tone and temper" of Housman's A Shropshire Lad. The Poet Laureate John Masefield told Powell he read them "with a great deal of admiration for their concision and point", and Hilaire Belloc said "I have read them with the greatest pleasure and interest ... I shall always retain them". His second volume of poems, Casting Off, and Other Poems, was printed in 1939. In its review, The Times Literary Supplement said Powell's "lyrical feeling, reflection, and an epigrammatic conciseness are pleasantly balanced, and he is particularly happy perhaps in saluting the blossoms of spring". Maurice Cowling appraised Powell's poems as "restrained and pessimistic, and written out of a high sense of human destiny. It expressed the position of youth and had an eschatological overtone characteristic of