ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author concedes the necessity of various forms of belief, and welcomes other formulations than those that he was aware of. He graciously allows everyone to follow the faith they knew. He argues that James Cousins was essentially a cosmopolitan modernist who forged creative ties with the East through the use of art and spirituality. While much of the narrative will be biographical in approach, the author offers a contextual reading of some of his significant cultural writings. Irish poet and critic James Cousins was no insular nativist or xenophobic nationalist. Cosmopolitan of the highest order, he and his spouse Margaret Cousins belong to the company of those who constituted what postcolonial critic Leela Gandhi calls transnational 'affective communities'. An early literary critic named Michael Walsh, writing in the Irish Monthly in 1932, credits James Cousins with being a cosmopolitan traveller, and yet curiously bypasses the work related to his entire Indian and Oriental journey.
