‘Linguistically Wounded’: Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Sylvia Plath, and the Limits of Poetic Artifice

Based on the archival evidence of Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s annotations to Sylvia Plath’s 1971 collection Winter Trees, as well as a 1972 typescript of Forrest-Thomson’s review of Winter Trees, which she never published, this article argues that Forrest-Thomson’s engagement with Plath’s late poetry played a crucial role in the development of her theory of ‘poetic artifice’. Yet I contend that the poems of Winter Trees by no means offer themselves as self-evident exemplars of such a theory, and I explore this disjunction by juxtaposing Forrest-Thomson’s revisionary account of Plath in Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry, which posits the poems ‘Daddy’ and ‘Purdah’ as anti-confessional works of art that clearly indicate their own ‘unreality’, against the Winter Trees review, which is more critical of Plath’s ‘compromises’. Because Forrest-Thomson’s aesthetic project is further complicated by her own development as a poet, I also consider a selection of poems published in the 1974 Omens Poetry Pamphlet Cordelia: or ‘A poem should not mean but be’, in order to explore an elided, yet suggestive, relation between feeling and theory in her poetry. Finally, I argue that this relation, which Plath’s ‘Purdah’ would seem to both prefigure and sanction, signals the presence of a reticent ‘linguistic emotionality’ in Forrest-Thomson’s work that not only contests the authority of her male modernist models, but also anticipates contemporary critical discourses in experimental poetry and poetics.


Introduction
Veronica Forrest-Thomson's decision to make Sylvia Plath the focus of the final pages of Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century, originally published by Manchester University Press in 1978, was a polemical move in that she sought to read Plath a typescript in the archive, reveal that Forrest-Thomson's engagement with Plath's poetry likely played a crucial role in the development of her theory of 'poetic artifice', despite a general lack of scholarship on the relationship between these poets.
My broader argument in the following pages is that Forrest-Thomson was working in the 1970s to claim Plath for a formalist, experimental tradition that could be best understood according to her own theory of 'poetic artifice'. At the same time, she was unable to theorize this gendered power play within the terms of her aesthetic project. It is interesting to note, then, that Forrest-Thomson critiques Plath for a similar 'blind[ness]' in Poetic Artifice, even as she pays 'tribute' to her poetry proper: 'unfortunately Sylvia Plath […] was unable to recognize in theory what she knew in poetic practice. We need not to be so blinded, however […]'. 9 Through her close readings of Plath, and anticipating many of Jacqueline Rose's criticisms in The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, Forrest-Thomson also sought to push back against the discourses of ' confessionalism', ' extremism', and psychic suffering that had negatively shaped interpretations of Plath's poems even before her suicide in 1963, but which had especially come to circumscribe Plath's reception during the early 1970s, when Forrest-Thomson was composing Poetic Artifice. 10 Yet the poems of Winter Trees also do not offer themselves as self-evident exemplars of 'Artifice', despite the fact that Forrest-Thomson concludes her book with a reading of Plath's 'Purdah' in which she praises the speaker for 'remain[ing] enigmatical, presenting only the words on the page'. 11 On the contrary, 'Purdah', in particular, and Winter Trees, as a whole, can be seen to pose difficulties for both Forrest-Thomson's theory and her poetic practice. Nor can it be assumed that Forrest-Thomson herself was unaware of the disjunction between her characterization of Plath in Poetic Artifice and her 1972 review of Winter Trees, in which she is far more critical of Plath's perceived inconsistencies and a lack of self-awareness as a poet. This disjunction gives rise to multiple questions: Why, in spite of numerous objections to Plath, does Forrest-Thomson offer such a laudatory reading of 'Purdah' in the final pages of Poetic Artifice, as well as an admiring analysis of the poem 'Daddy', first published in the 1965 collection Ariel? How are we to make sense of the interpretive constraints that Forrest-Thomson employs in order to produce her aesthetic argument that we should not read Plath as a confessional or ' extremist' poet? 12 The following analysis seeks to address these questions by examining the relationship between Forrest-Thomson's aesthetics and her poetics in the years between 1971 and 1975.

A 'New Kind of Subject'
The 'in being based on systematic procedures', and from rationality, 'in the fact that these procedures are an attempt to articulate a structure that is more fundamental, and in many ways destroys the normal procedures of rational discourse'. 13 Understood positively, as a transformative capacity to fictionalize or make strange (she was influenced by Viktor Shklovsky's concept of 'ostranenie'), 14 rather than negatively, as dissembling (unlike Milton's ' artificer of fraud'), 15 her theory of artifice would, she believed, allow poets and critics alike to transcend the limiting binary of rational versus irrational discourse. Articulating, and struggling to articulate, this ' concept of artifice' would be the rest of her life's work. 16 Additionally in 1971, Forrest-Thomson was awarded the 'New Poets' prize for her Wittgenstein-influenced collection Language-Games. Yet despite emphasizing scholarly ' questions of knowledge' and ' questions of technique' in an appended note to Language-Games, Forrest-Thomson also acknowledges in this same note that the poems included are equally about the quotidian ' experience of being engaged in a certain activity, in a certain place, at a certain time: the activity, research in English Literature, the place, Cambridge, the time, 1968-69'. 17 She concludes by stressing not just the theoretical 'importance of "subject" in a poem' but the conscious experience of 'human identity'. 18 This 'new kind of subject,' she declares, 'will be one that can be approached and even defined in terms of formal experimentation', by 'smashing and rebuilding the forms of thought'. 19 The fabrication of a poem, she argues, then 'becomes the record of a series of individual thresholds of the experience of being conscious; they form the definition, or affirmation, in time and in language, of human identity'. 20 In this revealing passage, Forrest-Thomson attempts to articulate 'individual thresholds of […] experience', or affective registers, that she senses are intrinsic to the creation of poetry. At the same time, she holds this statement at bay, qualifying it through her assertion that the explicitly poetic consciousness must register itself as 'formal experimentation'.
The term ' experimentation', as Forrest-Thomson is referring to it within the context of Language-Games, would therefore seem to be not merely a method for generating an avant-garde aesthetics, but also an index of 'human identity', even if that human, to speak with Barthes, only ' apprehends himself elsewhere', as ' a dispersion of energy in which there remains neither a central core nor a structure of meaning'. 21 And so it would appear that Forrest-Thomson was already faced, in Language-Games, with a tension inherent to the word ' experiment' itself. The noun ' experiment' can be defined as the ' action of trying anything, or putting it to proof; a test, a trial '. 22 Yet in the transitive sense, to ' experiment' is simply 'to experience; to feel, suffer'. 23 To ' experiment' in this second sense is synonymous with the sensuous experience of touch, which is what Judith Butler has identified as the ' animating condition of sentience' and ' actively animating principle of feeling and knowing'. 24 Any such relation between 'feeling and knowing' is something that Forrest-Thomson actively avoided theorizing in both 'Irrationality and Artifice' and Poetic Artifice, and this had implications, also, for her poetry, as Gareth Farmer explains in his recently published study Veronica Forrest-Thomson: Poet on the Periphery (2017): "Affective levels and parodic excesses unanticipated or positively resisted in theory emerge during the process of composition." 25 Yet the mutual relation that Butler underscores between cognition and emotionality was, I argue, crucial to Forrest-Thomson's developing poetics, as particularly evidenced by her poem 'Pastoral', which I discuss in the final section of this article. In other words, although Forrest-Thomson's note suggests that ' experience' and ' experiment' are inextricable for her as a poet, this does not mean that she was able to resolve the question of where and how to place the emphasis: in bearing witness to the sensuous experience of the everyday? or in a kind of ' epistemophilia' or desiring passion for knowledge? 26 It is in an effort to negotiate between the two, I suggest, that Forrest-Thomson begins to consider the poetry of Plath in earnest, as a poetic model and potential exemplar of her developing theory of 'poetic artifice'.

Reading and Reviewing Winter Trees
In addition to completing her dissertation, publishing Language-Games, and test- What Forrest-Thomson appreciates in 'Purdah' is the way in which its language abjures the burdens of linguistic ' appropriateness', by which she seems to mean the rational evaluation of syntax and imagery in particular.

Yet despite this instance of approbation, Forrest-Thomson's annotations in
Winter Trees tend more generally towards the critical. In her annotation at the bottom of 'Childless Woman', she writes that poem ' disintegrates into an uneasy extravagance'. 30 She asserts that the 'worst' aspect of 'Mystic' is its ' contamination of imagined state of mind or situation'. 31 She annotates the last two stanzas of 'Lyonnesse' and 'Thalidomide', respectively, with the scribbled comments 'spoilt' and 'spoiled'. 32 And in the margin of Plath's radio play, 'Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices', she remarks that the following three lines render the 'world of experience she [Plath] is against' 33 : I saw the world in it-small, mean and black, Every little world hooked to every little world, and act to act.
A blue day had budded into something. 34 annotations also indicate that she is drawn to this play's effort to approach the 'mean and black' nature of lived experience, as evidenced by the fact that she underlines 'The incalculable malice of the everyday'. 35 Moreover, at the end of the play, in an apparent attempt to resolve the contradictions that she seems to have experienced in her reading of it, Forrest-Thomson writes: ' dialectic between positive and negative in experience symbolized archetypically by this'. 36 This statement, I suggest, is not so much a resolution of the problem of rendering experience as poetry, but a gesture of suspension-for Forrest-Thomson is clearly struggling to square her own desire to use poetry as a means of 'recording […] a series of individual thresholds of the experience of being conscious' (as she states in her note to Language-Games) with her emergent theory of 'Artifice'. 37 For this reason, we can also read Forrest-Thomson's annotation that 'Three Women' renders the 'world of experience she is against' as signaling the commencement of an act of poetic refashioning and appropriation. In her unpublished review, Forrest-Thomson provides us with a proto-typical reading of 'Purdah' as an exemplar of 'poetic artifice'. On the one hand, the poem clearly represents 'the situation of a woman in purdah', or in seclusion for religious reasons. 47 Forrest-Thomson observes that the speaker of the poem 'presents to "the bridegroom" only her external surfaces; she is hoarding up her real self which will be loosed against him once she is able to reach an articulation of it[s] images of violence and irrationality'. 48 Yet 'this imagined situation', she argues, 'is simply a pretext for constructing images that interact with each other and claim our attention to their shifting relationships as a value independent of empirical reference '. 49 Forrest-Thomson also notes that ' abstract terms', which is how she characterizes Plath's ' clarities', 'visibilities', and 'my/Sheath of impossibles', are 'set up as tentative points for thematic summation among a profusion of physical details'. 50 This 'play of contrasts among levels of language' begins to take precedence over the imagined situation, she suggests, and therefore over the 'ponderous desire to evaluate language in terms of reality', so that the final three lines of the poem appear entirely 'free from emotional extremism': from any concrete and empirical 'I'. 51 In other words, the victory of the poem appears to be that it has extricated itself from 'the self, the poet or other persona '. 52 Yet this reading of 'Purdah' in the unpublished review of Winter Trees is offset, as in the annotations to Winter Trees, by sharp criticism of poems that ' compromise between non-empirical freedom and a desire to anchor this in a real situation'. 53 Forrest-Thomson argues that when such a compromise occurs, the poem's language inhabits a purgatory or 'limbo' between ' exact description and detached fantasy, getting the worst of both worlds'. 54 In particular, she criticizes Plath's 'Childless Woman', 'Thalidomide', 'Mystic', and 'The Rabbit Catcher' as instances in which the 'real situation' that ostensibly serves as each poem's pre-text proves itself 'too powerful for even the most daring images'. 55 In other words, these are poems in which ' experience' thwarts fictionalization or defamiliarization and, hence, overwhelms 'Artifice'. 56 As an example of the 'banality and forced poeticalness' that result, in her view, from such a ' compromise', Forrest-Thomson cites two passages from 'Lesbos': The baby smiles, fat snail,

From the polished lozenges of orange linoleum […]
The impotent husband slumps out for a coffee.

Theory and Practice: or the Limits of 'Artifice'
Forrest-Thomson begins Poetic Artifice by asserting nothing less than that her project is to address those aspects of poetry that are 'most difficult to articulate'. 59 Everyday language, she argues, gives 'information' and speaks about 'states of affairs' in the world; in contrast, poetry (when properly understood and executed) relies on ' elusive' and 'non-semantic' features of language, including ' apparently non-sensical imagery, logical discontinuity, referential opacity, and unusual metrical and spatial organization', which she characterizes as ' devices of artifice'. 60 Yet despite her structuralist predilection for categorizing different discourses or types of language, Forrest-Thomson concedes in the preface of Poetic Artifice (echoing her appended note to Language-Games) that the ' difficult' task of assessing the relationship between 'poetry' and the ' external world' is the 'major problem of this book.' 61 It is for these two reasons In this reading of 'Purdah', Forrest-Thomson focuses on the way in which the poem's final lines rapidly 'transition from a rampant beast (empirical imagery) to a mythological murder (discursive imagery) to "The cloak of holes"', in order to argue that the poem's ' discursive imagery negates the empirical but simultaneously asks to remain partly empirical: a cloak'. 62 This reading is possible, she argues, because Plath's final 'The' 'suggests a symbol' and thus 'sends us back into the poem again -to its fictionalised "I" for an explanation of the cloak of holes': an explanation, importantly, that is not forthcoming. 63 Farmer links this reticence to the subversion of ' a reader's advanced expectations about the poetic message', arguing that Forrest-Thomson's reading of 'Purdah' 'records how the content and form of a poem evade a reader's desire to read the poem as representative of a "state of mind"'. 64 In Plath's refusal to elucidate symbolic significance lies the negative power of the 'I' as a 'true artificer' who 'remains enigmatical, presenting only the words on the page'. 65 In Poetic Artifice, the new concept that arises out of Forrest-Thomson's desire to address the relationship between the external world and poetry is the 'image-complex'. The 'image-complex' is 'the node' of the poem 'where we can discover which of the multitude of thematic, semantic, rhythmic, and formal, patterns is important', allowing us to ' distinguish the relevant from the irrelevant' and ' control importation of external contexts' into the world of poetic language. 66  that Gascoyne fails to tell us 'how to organize the images' and so 'the only recourse is to treat them as empirical images-as references to the world-which, because they are so incomprehensible, reflect a state of chaos on the world', and hence, a kind of untransformed 'irrationality'. 67 In contrast, she proposes that The Waste Land produces a different and more productive poetic effect, as evidenced by Eliot's 'unreal city' passage, which uses 'bizarre and near-nonsensical imagery' and yet, in her estimation, still 'takes good care that this be related to the other levels of Artifice'. 68 Although she acknowledges that the phrase 'I had not thought death had undone so many' echoes both Dante and Baudelaire, Forrest-Thomson argues the blending of these historical figures with contemporary London produces a newly 'fictionalized' context of the poem. In The Waste Land, that is, the 'I' may be 'Dante, Baudelaire, Eliot as poet, Tiresias as Eliot's persona […], and all of these simultaneously'. 69 The powerful influence of Eliotic impersonality also extends to Forrest-Thomson's poetry, as confirmed by a page from Forrest-Thomson's 'Pomes' notebook. The gentle foal linguistically wounded, squeals like a car's brakes, like our twisted words. 79 The idyllic, 'grass[y]' landscape of the poem serves to 'summon the frightful glare' not of 'nouns and verbs' ('verdure' anticipating 'verb'), but of 'nouns and nerves', that is, of 'words' which are always already vehicles of feeling, 'twisted' by emotion.
'Pastoral' is also notable in that it recalls Plath's poem 'Words', which Ted Hughes selected to conclude Ariel. 80 The ironized pastoral imagery of a 'gentle foal linguisti- Words are exhausting, this stanza seems to imply; because we cannot master them (they are 'riderless'), they will likely master us. Yet why effect such a message while preserving the metaphor of an untamed horse rejecting human authority? Why, in other words, does Plath offer her reader such a metaphor, if what she wants to suggest is 'blank' artificiality or, indeed, resigned fatalism ('fixed stars/Govern a life')?
There is a resonant contradiction inherent in 'Words' whereby the simultaneous performance of affect and affectlessness combine to produce a poem in which the speaker appears overwhelmed by feeling even as she assures us-and, presumably, herself-of the inert status of 'Words dry and riderless', much in the way that Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay 'Experience', tells his reader 'I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature'. 82 Is Emerson mourning the loss of his affect more than the loss of his son? My answer is an emphatic negative, because of the fact that the statement that one is unable to articulate or even experience grief does not necessarily negate grief itself. This is an affective condition that Denise Riley, like Emerson, probes in her elegy for her son, 'A Part Song', when she bluntly renders the displacement of grief by boredom ('But by now/We're bored with our unproductive love,/and infinitely more bored by your staying dead') and mocks the impotency of apostrophic address ('I'll cry "Oh bee!" to you instead -/Since my own dead, apostrophized,/Keep mute […]'). 83 As Sharon Cameron argues in 'Representing Grief: Emerson's "Experience"', 'feeling survives the complaints of its being cancelled.
Emerson is conceding with one part of himself what he is disputing with another'. 84 The same intractable paradox, I argue, is true of Riley, Plath, and Forrest-Thomson.
'Pastoral', of course, is a poem, not a personal essay, and Forrest-Thomson would surely object to my introducing Emerson's autobiographical prose as a means of parsing her 'poetic language'. Yet 'Pastoral' engages with precisely these kinds of questions and contradictions, even if Forrest-Thomson never found a way to theorize this aspect of her poetics. It is all the more interesting, then, that when Forrest-Thomson discusses 'Pastoral' in Poetic Artifice, she performs a dispassionate, impersonal analysis, as if the poem has no connection with her whatsoever. She even refers to herself in the third person: 'Whatever the relation of Dada to Swinburne, Lear, Tennyson, and Forrest-Thomson […]'. 85 She then goes on to analyze the poem on purely formal grounds, arguing that the 'gentle foal' is 'important' not for his 'physical being', but 'for his entle oal sounds'; these sounds are meaningful, she emphasizes, because they are echoed in the phrase 'linguistically wounded', which she describes as ' crucial' for both 'the theme and for the rhythm' of this poem. 86 The fact that the foal's physical being is usurped by the sound of his name is a 'pretty paradox in view of the poem's theme', she suggests, 'since the poet is saying (thematic synthesis) just that: pre-occupation with linguistic problems prevents contact with the physical word world'. 87 In her reading of 'Pastoral', Forrest-Thomson acknowledges that 'the foal looks remarkably like a traditional symbol used to give the kind of empirical instance in a discursive argument that we saw in Donne and Eliot'. 88 However, she argues that something different is happening in the poem, which she explains by invoking the poetic genealogy of Dada, lauding its ' concrete meaninglessness' as a 'fundamental aesthetic experience'. 89 Such an ' aesthetic experience', she argues, is shared by the notions of ' aesthetic distance' and ' content as form' that are crucial to 'poetic artifice'. 90

'Linguistically Wounded'
Yet 'Pastoral' cannot fully be explained by either lineage: neither by the amped-up meaninglessness of Dada, nor by the more traditional metaphysical conceits of Donne and, by extension, Eliot. Forrest-Thomson's jarring imagery of a helpless young animal 'wounded' by something 'linguistic' rather than physical suggests, instead, that we ought to take seriously her reticent engagement with the kind of affective experience that Plath 'fictionalizes' in her best poems. One might even go a step further In these lines, which channel both Plath's impossible yearnings ('I also longed to be under/that bark') and Forrest-Thomson's self-conscious punning ('I throve/and thriving shamed me'), linguistic 'play' and ' direct personal statement' appear inextricably entangled. Thinking and feeling twine like Daphne, producing the metaphorical conceit of yet another hoofed creature as the speaker expresses her passionate desire to become a 'grief' that she has already ostensibly 'learned' or cognized, but which she nevertheless has yet to fully undergo (this is what both Emerson and Riley assert they cannot do). I wonder, also, if the stuttering advance of the awkward 'th' sound that Robertson traces across the second half of the passage, through 'throw', 'throve', and 'thriving' (a trio that likewise implies the humorous conjugation of an imaginary verb), rhythmically underscores the same kind of shame that Emerson experiences as he senses the shallowness of his 'grief'-an emotion that Robertson's speaker allegorizes as half animal, half tree, its 'forelegs' impeded by a 'sheath' of 'bark'. Through [to] the structuring movement of thought and feeling'. 95 It is essential to underscore, here, that both Riley and Armstrong make explicit reference to the poetry of Forrest-Thomson in their criticism; indeed, her poems seem to offer a kind of impetus or guide for them as they work to unfold their theoreti- This paradoxical comingling is underscored by the way in which the verb 'require' is awkwardly employed as the final grammatical object of the stanza, thereby gaining belated primacy over the difficult 'You' who is ' so much another'. What happens, this poem finally seems to ask, when a specific desire for the equitable division of love's labor is overwhelmed by a need or 'require' that exceeds the declarations of its possessive speaker?

Conclusion
Poetic Artifice takes the risk of presenting Sylvia Plath's poems, not as confessional, but, rather, as ' exponents of Artifice', as works of art that clearly indicate their own 'unreality'. 103 Such a reading not only belies the extent to which Forrest-Thomson modifies her views of certain aspects of Plath's writing; it also challenges us to reconsider the way in which we adjudicate the value, and objectives, of Forrest-Thomson's own poetry. From the vantage point of the present day, it is clear that Forrest-Thomson did not allow herself a way of conceptualizing the tension between the affective and impersonal qualities that together, with her propensity for formal experimentation, define her poetics. Instead, in keeping with the post-structuralist vogue of the moment, and also as a means of pushing back against the expressive confessionalism that she found so problematic in Ted Hughes, as well as in ' Messers.
Lowell, Berryman, Gunn, Davie, Larkin, Alvarez, Hobsbaum and Mrs Sexton', she choose not to theorize the relationship between the avant-garde experimentalism of her poetry and the agonistic 'I' that so often pervades it. 104 In this article, I have therefore sought to extrapolate this theoretical gap in order to suggest that she was crucially attracted to capturing, and articulating as poetry, a register of affective experience that she observed in Plath's late poems, and which Riley, for instance, has more recently described as 'linguistic emotionality': a speculative concept that might allow us to rethink the relation between Forrest-Thomson's poetics and aesthetics.
'My very self-description, even if it looks like my own confessional intimacy, has been sent to me by invitation', Riley argues, for 'I'm steeped in the world's words already […]'. 105 Forrest-Thomson's poetry discloses this same impossibility of extricating oneself from the 'world's words', from its 'kicks' and 'larks', its 'power to hurt', and its cheapening of ' overloved desire', even if she was unable, or unwilling, to theorize (see footnote). 6 Ibid.