Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1947–75) was a poet, a critic, and a literary theorist who specialized in poetry and poetics. Prior to her tragically early death she had published four collections of poems, while her final collection and her major work of criticism and theory, Poetic Artifice, were published posthumously. In 1990 her poetry and translations, published and unpublished, were gathered together and edited into the Collected Poems and Translations. This invaluable edition of Forrest-Thomson's work facilitated the current resurgence in her reputation, which had been maintained throughout the intervening years by a group of poets and critics who had either known her, or been made aware of her work by those who had. The extraordinary nature of her intervention in poetry and criticism during the brief years when she was publishing has steadily been gaining recognition both in Britain and in the United States, where the writers usually known as ‘Language Poets’ (of whom more in chapter 5) recognized her initiatives and innovations as cousins of their own.

Poet and academic, Forrest-Thomson was writing on the cusp of the movement from modernism to postmodernism, the two most significant cultural initiatives of the century. In her critical work and her poetic technique she learnt from the former and foreshadows the latter. For the reader the experimental work of the twentieth century is inevitably challenging at first acquaintance, and correspondingly exciting as its investigations of the limitations and possibilities of language are teased out. Forrest- Thomson worked at the leading edge of poetic language and wrestled with philosophical and linguistic ideas of great complexity in the medium of poetry itself, arguably a beginning to the postmodern deconstruction of the distinctions between creative and critical writing, between the work and the theories which underpin and illuminate it.

Forrest-Thomson's aesthetic was founded on her engagement with a range of different discourses, including those of science, of philosophy, and of literary studies. In the first instance the work of British critic and poet William Empson; then Wittgenstein's philosophy of language; the work of Roland Barthes; and that of the Tel Quel group in Paris, were significant influences. Forrest-Thomson was well ahead of her time in discovering and employing in her poetry and critical work the theories and practices of important poststructuralist writers.