Literary histories of nineteenth-century British and American poetry generally proceed in determined ignorance of one another, pausing on occasion to recognize the importance for individual poets of transatlantic exchange, but quickly folding matters of influence into larger narratives of the development of autonomous, national poetic traditions.

Critics' insistence on the independent trajectories of British and American poetry is especially perplexing given nineteenth-century conditions of publication. Due to the lack of international copyright, poems published in book and periodical form were freely reprinted on both sides of the Atlantic; even nationalistic poems such as Felicia Hemans's "Casabianca" and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha were transnational publishing phenomena. Moreover, many of the vehicles for the popularization of poetry in the nineteenth century were the product of trans- and circum-atlantic cultural exchange.

• What would happen to our canons of poetry and to our overarching narratives about poetic history if we attended to the traffic in poems across national borders?
• What were the modes of circulation of poetry in the nineteenth century, and how can we model the currents of trans- and circum-atlantic exchange?
• How does the importance of American poetry to British radicals, provincial publishers, and dissenting religious traditions broker the relation of British and American culture more broadly?
• How can we understand the ways in which popular British poetry is internal to the American literary tradition?
• How does the transatlantic situation of poetry in the nineteenth century differ from that of modernist internationalism?