Eliot's early poetic reputation was made thanks to a network of his friends, the first of whom in importance is his fellow student at Harvard, the poet and critic Conrad Aiken. Early in 1914 Aiken took a copy of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ with him to London. He showed it to Harold Monro, English poet and proprietor of the Poetry Bookshop; Monro, he claimed, thought the poem ‘insane’. On the other hand Ezra Pound, American poet and publicist, ‘recognised Prufrock instantly’. When Eliot arrived in England from Marburg a few months later, he met Pound. Impressed by its author, Pound then sent ‘Prufrock’ off to Harriet Monroe for her Chicago-based magazine, Poetry. She was not eager to publish, and delayed eight months before it appeared at last in June 1915. In the following month, ‘Preludes’ and ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ appeared in the second number of Wyndham Lewis's magazine Blast. Judging by the coolness of Lewis's response (‘very respectable intelligent verse’), he was deferring to Pound's judgement.

Pound's exertions did not end here. ‘Prufrock’ appeared again, with ‘Portrait of a Lady’, in his Catholic Anthology in November 1915, and attracted favourable attention not only from the loyal Aiken in Poetry Journal (‘psychological character-studies, subtle to the verge of insoluble idiosyncrasy, introspective, self-gnawing’ [Brooker, 3]) but also in the London Nation, which singled it out for special attention.