Farmer offers a detailed outline of Forrest-Thomson's thinking and terminology in her posthumously published book, Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry. The book was conceived as adapting tenets of William Empson's close reading to the procedural practice and philosophical positions of the post-structuralist project in ways that amounted to a new definition of the nature of poetry. Forrest-Thomson perceived the particularities of poetry to be under threat by philosophical and theoretical developments; as such, poets and critics needed to outline poetry's distinctiveness in order to defend it as formally and epistemologically unique. Perceiving the destabilising lack of control shaking the formalist foundations of structuralist and post-structuralist thought, Forrest-Thomson sought to re-establish control by reasserting certain unities, including an almost Platonic sense of poetic Artifice.