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 She assisted Christopher Ricks with his edition of "The Inventions of the March Hare" (1996), a volume of Eliot's unpublished verse.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 [Eliot] invented, let alone how much of it is a reaction against him or indeed a consequence of misreading him. He is a very penetrating influence, perhaps not unlike the east wind." In his critical essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent", Eliot argues that art must be understood not in a vacuum, but in the context of previous pieces of art. "In a peculiar sense [an artist or poet] ... must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past." This essay was an important influence over the New Criticism by introducing the idea that the value of a work