Ever since Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (1991), it has become axiomatic to view print media as central to the formation of national consciousness. In the British Empire, newspapers functioned as what historian Chris Holdridge has termed a ‘discursive mediator of identity’ for those British emigrants who forsook the metropole for the settler colonies after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The function of newspaper poetry within this broader anglophone media ecology has been debated in recent years, as poetry's portability has re-established its importance to scholars interested in the role that print culture played in enabling the articulation of emerging national identities in the British settler colonies. Poetry's ability to traverse borders – both physically, as the portable property of emigrants or through the ‘cut and scissors’ reprint culture of nineteenth-century journalism, and imaginatively, through memorisation, reproduction and imitation – has led to a spate of recent studies that highlight the importance of poetry for the development of colonial literary cultures across the Anglo-world.

As Jason Rudy has argued, the material form of poetry is central to its success as a globally circulating cultural commodity: poetry's portability ‘meant it could circulate with ease through Britain's colonies, spaces that at first were not equipped to publish longer works’. Throughout the nineteenth century, the most common way for poetry to be transferred from the private notebooks and memories of recently arrived emigrants to the public sphere was via colonial newspapers. In an era before the development of field-specific periodicals, colonial newspapers functioned as what Scotsman George Greig, the printer of the Cape Colony's first independent newspaper the South African Commercial Advertiser, termed ‘a medium of general communication’ connecting geographically dispersed settler communities to colonial hubs such as Cape Town and Sydney, as well as to metropolitan Britain. Correspondence pages and ‘poet's corners’ featuring reprinted and original verse were the means through which settlers could participate dialogically in the public sphere debates that editors of colonial newspapers were shaping through their lead articles. As a result, poetry can be considered as an integral part of the nation-building project that colonial editors were actively engaged in through newspaper publication.

Both Rudy and Kirstie Blair have recently highlighted the role that emigrant verse played in enabling diasporic communities, fractured by the upheavals of emigration, to re-establish a sense of community in their new homelands.