Farmer argues that Forrest-Thomson's reconsideration of the influence of nineteenth-century poetry on modernists, in particular Ezra Pound, led her to conclude that nineteenth-century poets offered baroque poetic structures, enabling them to create complex texts as well as theories of personae and myth which could treat experience and emotion in purely aesthetic ways. For Forrest-Thomson, complexity was tied up with a formal sincerity identified by Pound, and Farmer examines her development of the "limpidly lyrical" quality of poetic language. Close readings of Forrest-Thomson's late poems, drawing on a range of archival and unpublished materials, reveal them as stages towards lyrical complexity and speaking 'straight". Farmer concludes with an in-depth discussion of how Forrest-Thomson's poem "Richard II" reconciles some of her theoretical ambitions with her poetic practice.