Combining current cognitive science on time perception with Victorian poetry, this dissertation investigates how poetry alters the subjective time of a reader. Since poetry is a durational art form, with poems unfolding in time as the reader moves through the words within the poem, the time encoded in the language of the poem is transmitted to the reader as modulation in their own temporal perceptions. This power is enacted primarily through the formal structures of poetry that underlie the content of the poem itself: meter, rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, anaphora, and other methods of turning words into temporal patterns. These formalist considerations reinscribe understandings of what poetry is expected to do to a reader by carrying meaning, emotion, and, now, time. Three models are developed for the implications of time perception: (1) entrainment and how the real time processing of language allows formalisms to be felt in the reader's body, (2) the psychological present and how a more robust understanding of "now" enables explanations about the poetic language feeling alive, and (3) neuro-genre as an application of the brain's own genre schema for recognizing poems and how this complicates debates about the nature of the lyric genre. This final intervention tests definitions of the lyric poetry genre by placing it under the real-world conditions of nineteenth-century newspaper reprinting to demonstrate how print culture gives additional evidence for these methods of understanding reading. While Victorian Studies has considered how the history of science impacted literature, this dissertation allows for the current science of temporal perception to add to understandings of why poetry captures readerly attention and generates meaning for so many readers.