Once dismissed as moralistic and self‐indulgent, Victorian poetry is now read as a repository of contestation and linguistic dynamism. A symbolic–idealist mode follows the traditions of Romantic subjectivism until the circumscribed introspection of the nineties. A developing psychological focus relocates mental states on the borders between self and a social–political world where perception is a process of linguistic mediation. Dramatic and narrative emphases absorb contemporary issues – religion, science, gender roles, sexual morality, slavery, prostitution, both personal and institutional politics, both private and national identities. Some poetry expounds the virtues of domestic morality and spiritual value, but a great deal tests the boundaries of human understanding. This poetry enacts discursive conflict, self‐consciously engaging the materiality of language and finding innovative ways of dramatizing the continuing tensions wrought by personal demands (love, hatred, desire) in relation to external cultural forces (tradition, belief, bourgeois politics).