I first discovered the poetry of T.S. Eliot when I was, I think, in my late twenties. I hadn't really studied modern poetry before then and particularly his Four Quartets which was his last great work and really partly for which he won the Nobel Prize. This has meant an enormous amount to me and many other Christians. It's one of those poems that's inexhaustible, I don't claim to have understood more than bits of it, but there's something about it which is like a great symphony. It carries you along even if you can't necessarily whistle all the tunes as you go down the street. And it's about coming back to Christian faith as a resolution of all of the questions that he's had all throughout his life. As a result of which, he talks about words and meanings – wrestling with those. And the poem itself is wrestling with words and it finally comes back – every phrase and sentence that is right, this is what we're actually aiming for. The last great stanza of the poem is so memorable: "We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." And then he goes on, "All shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well, when the tongues of flame are enfolded into the crowned knot of fire and the fire and the rose are one." 

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Reading poetry is one of those funny things which different people approach differently. There's a danger of allowing the left brain to take over and say "I want to know what the meaning of every phrase is" but actually with poetry, like with music, you have to tell that bit of your brain to shut up and just feel the music, feel the rhythm, hear and sense the words as a sort of physical reality. Meaning will emerge from that but it will come through a different bit of you from how you would read say a mathematics text book or something. So poetry works at several different levels and Eliot was exploring all those different levels and that's one of the reasons he's so exciting.

N. T. Wright, interviewed by Krish Kandian