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Farmer outlines the scope of the book, which offers a chronological study of key aspects of Forrest-Thomson's poetry and critical writing, detailing the relevance of her poetic theory and poetic practice to select contemporary poetic debates. Farmer argues that Forrest-Thomson's work offers unique perspectives on a period of twentieth-century British literary studies when French structuralism began to be widely read, and suggests that she was the only critic who had the vision to attempt to reconcile the close reading strategies of F. R. Leavis and William Empson with the indeterminate models of language and thought of post-structuralism. Against prevailing critical trends, Farmer argues that that the diverse and sometimes contradictory nature of Forrest-Thomson's poetic project makes it exemplary of a type of "late modernist" practice.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-62722-9_1

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