‘The question always is,’ says Forrest-Thomson, ‘how do poems work?’ This question, posed from the outset of Poetic Artifice, demonstrates that for her, though the issue is a complex one, the primary focus in reading a poem must be upon process: how meaning is constructed, rather than what the poem means. Form and function – how the poem works and what it does – then become central to interpretation, rather than peripheral, although they are not ultimately separable from content and meaning. Forrest-Thomson's theoretical and critical heritage included the poet and critic William Empson, whose work she much admired. But, for her, his poetry and poetics, formalist, elegant, and intellectually demanding, shows insufficient comprehension of the important role in the future of poetry of what she characterized as the ‘non-meaningful levels of poetic language, such as phonetic and prosodic patterns and spatial organisation’ (PA xi).

The key term here, and it is one which has been contested by Language poet Charles Bernstein, is of course ‘non-meaningful’, and it is worth asking, as he does, how any aspect of language can be non-meaningful. Forrest-Thomson also refers to this aspect or level of language as non-semantic, or (in debate with French poet Michel Couturier at the Cambridge Poetry Festival in 1975) less intransigently as ‘semi-meaningful’. This last formulation gives a clearer indication of the way in which she wanted both to use in her own poetry and to discuss in other poems the functions of the conventional techniques of poetic language: of sound, metre, rhythm, punctuation, typography, line endings and beginnings, and so on. They might then rather be described as prosthetic, or contributory to meaning, than as intrinsically meaningful.

It is with regard to the question of meaning that Forrest- Thomson also takes issue with Empson's literary criticism. Part of the problem with Empson's work is its emphasis on his innovative concept, poetic ‘ambiguity’. Ambiguity, while it foreshadows the postmodern concern with polysemy, multiple meaning, is often discovered by Empson because of his primary concern with the poem's meaning, and his conviction that the meaning of a poem can be discovered by reference to the world outside the poem, while Forrest-Thomson insists that it is within the world of words, within the poem, that the poem can and must be discovered.