In March 1935 Yeats was contracted by Oxford University Press to compile an Oxford Book of Modern Verse for the period 1900 to 1935. He was evidently pleased by the invitation: perhaps it would allow him to set the choice poems in a persuasive order. On July 4 he asked the publisher if he might start the book at 1892, the year of Tennyson's death, so that he might bring in Hopkins, Ernest Dowson “and some others who belong to the Modern Movement, though they died before 1900.” This was agreed without fuss, and the anthology was indeed called The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935. At one stage of preparation it was meant to include American poets, but in the event it hardly did, only Eliot and Pound being featured. No Frost, no Stevens. In 1935 Auden was still an English poet. Yeats wrote to Olivia Shakespear: “My problem this time will be: ‘How far do I like the Ezra [Pound], Eliot, Auden school and if I do not, why not?’” He set to work and finished the job by the end of November: he must have known most of the poems he liked and intended to include. It took several months to deal with problems of copyright, permissions, refusals, and fees, but the book was published a year later, on November 19, 1936, though it was dated 1937.