While Forrest-Thomson uses parody throughout her later poems as part of her ‘kit for transforming the non-poetic into the poem’ (PA 129), rather than to achieve a satiric or burlesque effect, it is particularly in her recuperations of aspects of Romantic and Victorian poetry in the poems of On the Periphery where the connection between parody and gender is made. A form of parody developed from her use of other languagegames in that of poetry becomes the most important technique in the long poem ‘Cordelia or “A poem should not mean, but be”’, but there are other poems in the collection which prepare the ground for the negotiations with parody and gender that appear in ‘Cordelia’.

Forrest-Thomson's uneasy poetic relationship with gender – an issue closely related to the question of the construction of identity in language – is influenced by her engagement with Eliot 's idea of ‘poetic impersonality’ in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, and in particular his separation of ‘the man who suffers and the mind which creates’ (Eliot2, 41). This distinction is a precursor to that now customarily made between the poet and the ‘I’ set up by the poem, and a rejection of the biographical fallacy which collapses the two. In Poetic Artifice there are two citations of Eliot's phrase in connection with Sylvia Plath (PA 113, 159). The interpretation of Plath's work often still suffers from that fallacy, and Forrest-Thomson's second allusion forms part of a critique of Ted Hughes's ‘inappropriate idea of a poet's relation to his poems’, that is precisely his collapsing of the distinction between the poet and the speaking subject of the poem.