I don't think a correction is necessary. Both parts of the sentence are already in the present tense. Plus, the use of "us" in the beginning of the sentence indicates a personal attachment.
The poet Ampleforth is the character who was surprisingly thrown in the cell with Winston, the main character.
The surprise isn't really that the poet was jailed, but that he ended up in the same cell as Winston, after all, he had been slipping forbiden words into his poem's "translations" before, a very punishable offense.
Faulkner believes that a young writer must become a shining example of artistic integrity for future generations.
