During the Easter holiday that year, MacNeice made a brief lecture tour of various American universities, also meeting Mary and Charles Katzmann and giving a reading with Auden and Christopher Isherwood in New York attended by John Berryman, and at which Auden met Chester Kallman for the first time. MacNeice also met the writer Eleanor Clark in New York, and arranged to spend the next academic year on sabbatical so that he could be with her. A lectureship at Cornell University was organised, and in December 1939 MacNeice sailed for America, leaving his son in Ireland. Cornell proved a success but the relationship with Eleanor did not, and MacNeice was back in London by the end of 1940. Faber and Faber published "Selected Poems" in March 1940, which contained 20 poems drawn from "Poems 1935", "The Earth Compels" and "Autumn Journal". It went through six impressions by 1945. MacNeice worked as a freelance journalist (he had resigned from his lecturing position at Bedford College while in America) and was awaiting the publication of "Plant and Phantom", which was dedicated to Clark (the previous year, the Cuala Press had published "The Last Ditch", a limited edition containing some poems that would appear in the new volume). In early 1941, MacNeice was employed by the BBC.