In the latter half of the nineteenth century, a significant group of poetic works emerged which foregrounded the soul as a means of examining the intricacies of queer sexual selfhood. Redirecting focus from the queer body as a site of perversion and sexual depravity – a notion which pervaded the late-Victorian cultural consciousness – toward the immaterial soul, such works put forth radical ideas of sexual subjectivity and imagined alternative models of same-sex love that were not predicated on sex or physical intimacy. This poetic treatment of the soul by queer writers in the late-Victorian era forms the principal focus of my doctoral research, and this project will investigate the ways in which a particular set of poets established in the final decades of the nineteenth century a mode of self-construction and expression in poetry that was contingent on the characterisation and transcendent capabilities of the soul.