What writers from our century will endure? Surely the poets T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden will make the list, both informed by Christian sensibility. Solzhenitsyn no doubt will, albeit more for the raw force of his words than for their craft. Perhaps J. R. R. Tolkien will also be read a century from now, his invention of another world still shedding light on this one.

One of those artists, T. S. Eliot, makes an interesting study. Faced with the political crises of communism and nazism, for twenty years he wrote little poetry, concerning himself instead with more “urgent” matters such as politics, economics, and pragmatic schemes to improve society. In such works as Idea of a Christian Society, After Strange Gods, and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, he turned away from firmly embedded nails and toward goads. Yet who reads those works today? Eliot’s poetry easily outlasted his well-intentioned ideas. Can we learn a lesson from Eliot? Perhaps the best way to achieve the values we approve is not to talk about them all the time, or to try and legislate them, but rather to create literature and art in which they are placed as firmly embedded nails.

Philip Yancey, "The Writer as Artist"