Valerie Eliot it." Following T. S. Eliot's 1965 death, Valerie Eliot was his most important editor and literary executor, having brought to press "The Waste Land: Facsimile and Manuscripts of the Original Drafts" (1971) and " The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume 1, 1898–1922" (1989). She assisted Christopher Ricks with his edition of "The Inventions of the March Hare" (1996), a volume of Eliot's unpublished verse. A long-delayed second volume of T. S. Eliot's letters was also edited by her. One of Valerie Eliot's most lucrative decisions as executor was granting permission for a stage musical to be based on her
T. S. Eliot observed that this time also marked the beginning of the decline in Eliot's literary influence: As Eliot's conservative religious and political convictions began to seem less congenial in the postwar world, other readers reacted with suspicion to his assertions of authority, obvious in "Four Quartets" and implicit in the earlier poetry. The result, fueled by intermittent rediscovery of Eliot's occasional anti-Semitic rhetoric, has been a progressive downward revision of his once towering reputation. Bush also notes that Eliot's reputation "slipped" significantly further after his death. He writes, "Sometimes regarded as too academic (William Carlos Williams's view), Eliot was also frequently