Current scholarship on Anglophone poetry recognizes its symbolic importance as a portable marker of collective cultural identification, enabling the articulation of national identities in colonial cultures. Yet while such work offers a comparative framework that expands the geographical frame of nineteenth-century Anglophone poetry, the critical tendency to view colonial poetry within specific national literary traditions replicates the nationalist literary-historical frameworks it claims to be challenging. Using methodologies from new imperial history that attend to what Tony Ballyntine calls the ‘webs’ of commodity and knowledge exchange that traversed the British Empire, this panel shows that global Anglophone poetry, much of which was published in newspapers, needs to be resituated within transnational media histories of imperial print culture.

Lara Atkin will argue that the ‘cut and scissors’ culture of reprinting enabled the work of popular nineteenth–century poets such as Burns, Hemans, and Hood to go ‘viral’ in the colonies. Unmoored from the biographical and cultural contexts of their original publication, colonial newspaper editors remediated these poems to create new ‘transnational imaginaries’ for diverse, polyglot reading publics in Australia, India and the Cape Colony. Working comparatively across these three colonial locations, her paper examines the interrelationship between Anglophone colonial poetry and the European and Indigenous literary cultures with which it was imbricated.

Kate Bergren will focus on the imitations of popular poems that proliferated wildly in newspapers throughout the nineteenth-century Anglophone world. These seemingly derivative poems, which carried a tune that almost anyone could hum, not only represented everyday, local concerns but also mediated complex and multi-vocal debates about race, representation, and place. Bergren takes a transimperial approach to the archive of newspaper poetry by analyzing how the adaptation of familiar sounds and forms allowed anonymous, ordinary, and now-forgotten writers to shape regional and national ideologies and disseminate them to overlapping reading publics in the Anglophone world.

Manu Chander’s paper considers the traffic of periodical poetry to and from British Guiana in the late nineteenth century, demonstrating how the colony mediates the literary relationship between England and the US in the period. In the first part of his talk, Chander will focus on Egbert Martin as a figure whose Guyanese periodical poetry placed English and American figures in dialogue to establish the terms of a distinctive global Anglophone poetics. In the second part of the talk, Chander goes on to discuss the different responses to Martin’s work in the British and American Press in order to suggest that the cosmopolitan dialogue that Martin sought to create was ultimately undercut by the competing interests of England and the US, two literary centers vying for relative authority in the nineteenth-century republic of letters.

Each presenter will speak for fifteen minutes in order to leave ample time for discussion, which we hope will address the current state of Anglophone literary studies and the ways that periodical poetry compels us to reconsider the emphasis conventionally placed on authorship and the durability of literary objects in the study of poetry.