Cosmopolitan Anarchy: Ananda Coomaraswamy, Transnationalism, and Walt Whitman.

This article explores how anarchists championing Walt Whitman's sexual libertarianism before and during World War I were eclipsed by American conservatives, who promoted the poet as a parochial nationalist to assert the hegemony of US-style democracy on a global scale. Focusing on a special "Walt Whitman" issue of The Modern School journal marking the centenary of the poet's birth in 1919, I discuss Ananda Coomaraswamy's argument that Whitman was spokesperson of a "new religion" antithetical to puritanical sexuality, capitalist acquisitiveness, and the anthropocentrism undergirding the West's industrial exploitation of the natural world. I conclude with an examination of Lajpat Rai's mobilization of Whitman to the cause of Indian nationalism and Coomaraswamy's disruptive counter discourse, in which Whitman embodied an anarchic form of cosmopolitanism that was internationalist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]