Fields of Dharma: On T.S. Eliot and Robert Gray

This essay considers two quite different long religious poems of the twentieth century: T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets and Robert Gray's ‘Dharma Vehicle’. Both address cultural transitions of several sorts: Eliot in a poem that, while it involves various world religions, ends up affirming Christianity; and Gray in a poem that explores Buddhism. Each poem is centered on dharma, Eliot's on the Hindu sense and Gray's on the Buddhist sense. Each poem extends, in its own way, what counts as ‘religious poetry’, though Gray's poem shows us something unexpected: how Pound's poetry can be taken as a model for writing religious verse of a new kind.