Cambridge, Verbal Hiccups and Iambics: Twelve Academic Questions and Language-Games

Abstract

Farmer argues that Forrest-Thomson’s works from 1968 to 1971 dramatise central literary-critical questions of her contemporary academy, most of which stem directly from the writings of William Empson, I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis and Donald Davie, as well as structuralism and post-structuralism and the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Farmer outlines Forrest-Thomson’s engagements with literary-critical debates, assessing the means by which she asserted poetry’s status amid a clamour of theoretical threat. Farmer argues that, in introducing a range of theoretical positions to her aesthetic theory and poetry, Forrest-Thomson exposes her aesthetics to the instabilities of the contingent and the radically disjunctive. Forrest-Thomson combats an imminent literary identity crisis by confirming in her poems that poetry’s strength comes from its figurative control as well as its formal conventions.