In England, Frost befriended the essayist Edward Thomas, and their conversations led to the birth of Thomas’s poetic career and the sure growth of Frost’s own. Their long walks and conversations coincided with the development in Frost’s poetry of a complex blend of dramatic narrative and dialogue. A mortar shell ended Thomas’s life in World War I, and one of Frost’s only elegies, “To E. T.,” was written in his memory. Having met little success in getting individual poems published in the United States, Frost was able to assemble an entire collection and sought out an English publisher. In 1913, David Nutt brought out A Boy’s Will, followed a year later by North of Boston. Both received numerous positive reviews, including one by the impresario and practitioner of literary high modernism, Ezra Pound. Frost met and sparred with major players in the British literary scene, including Pound, William Butler Yeats, Ford Maddox Ford, and T. E. Hulme, all of whom, with a certain measure of condescension, found his poetry superb. Pound, an expatriate native of Idaho, was giddy over having “just discovered another Amur‘kn. VURRY Amu’k’n, with, I think, the seeds of grace.” Pound advised Harriet Monroe, editor of the prestigious journal Poetry, to print his review of Frost’s first book “at once as we ought to be first and some of the reviewers here are sure to make fuss enough to get quoted in N.Y.” Patronizing and opportunistic though he may have been, Pound knew, as he had when he first encountered the work of T. S. Eliot, a good thing when he saw it. By the time of his return to the United States in 1915, Frost had become a poet of considerable note, and Henry Holt was eager to publish his books. After the publication of Mountain Interval in 1916, he was offered a onesemester teaching position at Amherst, which he eventually quit in 1920 after disagreements with the president, Alexander Meiklejohn. From then on Frost would spend his time in and out of visiting professorships at prestigious universities. His reputation grew to national and global proportions, fueled both by the power of his work and also by his success as a performer and raconteur. The twenty years of relative isolation and anonymity that had produced some of the most engaging and innovative poetry of the twentieth century were over.