The men who established Quadrant saw a very different world from the one that appeared to the founders of Overland, The secular left believed, in the words of Eric Aarons, that they ‘could create a society where the suffering that propelled people towards religion would be eliminated.’ The need for a religious faith was to them evidence of a shameful emptiness of being. For James McAuley, founding editor of Quadrant, this emptiness was the central fact of life. Left unfilled, it became home for the demons that threatened to bring disaster on both the individual and society.

The fear of social and personal disintegration haunts McAuley's early poems, ambiguously in the Blue Horses that ‘stamp among the spiritual mills’ and ‘weave a universe from our decay’, more terribly in the ‘monstrous form of God's antagonist’ that sprang from Aldebaran as the incarnation of Sirius. This fear drove him from anarchism through Buddhism to the Catholicism that offered the certainty and structure he needed. Catholicism alone could control the fear which, he told the poet Vincent Buckley, had for years led him every night to thank God that he had got through another day without committing an act of violence on those closest to him. In his poetry, the firm prosody controls the centrifugal impulses to violence and disintegration. In his public life, his inner fears were projected onto the threat of world communism.