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Ariel: The Restored Edition
Sylvia Plath's famous collection, as she intended it.
When Sylvia Plath died, she not only left behind a prolific life but also her unpublished literary masterpiece, Ariel. When her husband, Ted Hughes, first brought this collection to life, it garnered worldwide acclaim, though it wasn't the draft Sylvia had wanted her readers to see. This facsimile edition restores, for the first time, Plath's original manuscript—including handwritten notes—and her own selection and arrangement of poems. This edition also includes in facsimile the complete working drafts of her poem "Ariel," which provide a rare glimpse into the creative process of a beloved writer. This publication introduces a truer version of Plath's works, and will no doubt alter her legacy forever.
When Sylvia Plath died, she not only left behind a prolific life but also her unpublished literary masterpiece, Ariel. When her husband, Ted Hughes, first brought this collection to life, it garnered worldwide acclaim, though it wasn't the draft Sylvia had wanted her readers to see. This facsimile edition restores, for the first time, Plath's original manuscript—including handwritten notes—and her own selection and arrangement of poems. This edition also includes in facsimile the complete working drafts of her poem "Ariel," which provide a rare glimpse into the creative process of a beloved writer. This publication introduces a truer version of Plath's works, and will no doubt alter her legacy forever.
224 pages, Paperback
First published November 9, 2004
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About the author
Sylvia Plath
292 books28.9k followersSylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer, widely regarded as one of the most influential and emotionally powerful authors of the 20th century. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she demonstrated literary talent from an early age, publishing her first poem at the age of eight. Her early life was shaped by the death of her father, Otto Plath, when she was eight years old, a trauma that would profoundly influence her later work.
Plath attended Smith College, where she excelled academically but also struggled privately with depression. In 1953, she survived a suicide attempt, an experience she later fictionalized in her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar. After recovering, she earned a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Newnham College, Cambridge, in England. While there, she met and married English poet Ted Hughes in 1956. Their relationship was passionate but tumultuous, with tensions exacerbated by personal differences and Hughes's infidelities.
Throughout her life, Plath sought to balance her ambitions as a writer with the demands of marriage and motherhood. She had two children with Hughes, Frieda and Nicholas, and continued to write prolifically. In 1960, her first poetry collection, The Colossus and Other Poems, was published in the United Kingdom. Although it received modest critical attention at the time, it laid the foundation for her distinctive voice—intensely personal, often exploring themes of death, rebirth, and female identity.
Plath's marriage unraveled in 1962, leading to a period of intense emotional turmoil but also extraordinary creative output. Living with her two children in London, she wrote many of the poems that would posthumously form Ariel, the collection that would cement her literary legacy. These works, filled with striking imagery and raw emotional force, displayed her ability to turn personal suffering into powerful art. Poems like "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" remain among her most famous, celebrated for their fierce honesty and technical brilliance.
In early 1963, following a deepening depression, Plath died by suicide at the age of 30. Her death shocked the literary world and sparked a lasting fascination with her life and work. The posthumous publication of Ariel in 1965, edited by Hughes, introduced Plath's later poetry to a wide audience and established her as a major figure in modern literature. Her novel The Bell Jar was also published under her own name shortly after her death, having initially appeared under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas."
Plath’s work is often classified within the genre of confessional poetry, a style that emphasizes personal and psychological experiences. Her fearless exploration of themes like mental illness, female oppression, and death has resonated with generations of readers and scholars. Over time, Plath has become a feminist icon, though her legacy is complex and occasionally controversial, especially in light of debates over Hughes's role in managing her literary estate and personal history.
Today, Sylvia Plath is remembered not only for her tragic personal story but also for her immense contributions to American and English literature. Her work continues to inspire writers, artists, and readers worldwide. Collections such as Ariel, Crossing the Water, and Winter Trees, as well as her journals and letters, offer deep insight into her creative mind. Sylvia Plath’s voice, marked by its intensity and emotional clarity, remains one of the most haunting and enduring in modern literature.
Plath attended Smith College, where she excelled academically but also struggled privately with depression. In 1953, she survived a suicide attempt, an experience she later fictionalized in her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar. After recovering, she earned a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Newnham College, Cambridge, in England. While there, she met and married English poet Ted Hughes in 1956. Their relationship was passionate but tumultuous, with tensions exacerbated by personal differences and Hughes's infidelities.
Throughout her life, Plath sought to balance her ambitions as a writer with the demands of marriage and motherhood. She had two children with Hughes, Frieda and Nicholas, and continued to write prolifically. In 1960, her first poetry collection, The Colossus and Other Poems, was published in the United Kingdom. Although it received modest critical attention at the time, it laid the foundation for her distinctive voice—intensely personal, often exploring themes of death, rebirth, and female identity.
Plath's marriage unraveled in 1962, leading to a period of intense emotional turmoil but also extraordinary creative output. Living with her two children in London, she wrote many of the poems that would posthumously form Ariel, the collection that would cement her literary legacy. These works, filled with striking imagery and raw emotional force, displayed her ability to turn personal suffering into powerful art. Poems like "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" remain among her most famous, celebrated for their fierce honesty and technical brilliance.
In early 1963, following a deepening depression, Plath died by suicide at the age of 30. Her death shocked the literary world and sparked a lasting fascination with her life and work. The posthumous publication of Ariel in 1965, edited by Hughes, introduced Plath's later poetry to a wide audience and established her as a major figure in modern literature. Her novel The Bell Jar was also published under her own name shortly after her death, having initially appeared under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas."
Plath’s work is often classified within the genre of confessional poetry, a style that emphasizes personal and psychological experiences. Her fearless exploration of themes like mental illness, female oppression, and death has resonated with generations of readers and scholars. Over time, Plath has become a feminist icon, though her legacy is complex and occasionally controversial, especially in light of debates over Hughes's role in managing her literary estate and personal history.
Today, Sylvia Plath is remembered not only for her tragic personal story but also for her immense contributions to American and English literature. Her work continues to inspire writers, artists, and readers worldwide. Collections such as Ariel, Crossing the Water, and Winter Trees, as well as her journals and letters, offer deep insight into her creative mind. Sylvia Plath’s voice, marked by its intensity and emotional clarity, remains one of the most haunting and enduring in modern literature.
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March 12, 2021No rating. Some of the poems were very good. The world and fandom around Sylvia Plath makes me uneasy, and sad. The parts I most connected to were her daughters words at the beginning and end.
February 27, 2011
Since about 1980 I have probably read Ariel six times, and once again I step back from it thinking, My God! It remains for me the most powerful collection of poetry that I’ve ever read. However, I should probably scratch that word “remains,” since my previous readings had me in awe of numerous poems within the collection. But with this new edition, I am reading for the first time, Plath’s arrangement, which jacks things up considerably (How could that be possible?). I have no side in the Hughes / Plath wars. He cheated on her; she was high maintenance. As an outsider, it’s impossible to know much more beyond that surface story. On the poetry side of things, I have always thought that Hughes (a superb poet), with his violent and powerful imagery (see Crow) provided an assist in Plath’s own growth as a poet. And being the smart girl that she was, she would not be outdone in savage imagery, especially when Hughes provided her, though his adultery, with a red hot core of poetic purpose.
And I don’t think this can be downplayed in any way. Frieda Hughes, the couple’s daughter, says so clearly in her (indispensible) Introduction, acknowledging (what we all know) that Ariel is an act of revenge. For Frieda, this is a difficult and sensitive subject. She loved her father, she loved her mother. She does try to recycle – though she doesn’t necessarily agree -- the old Hughes argument that the earlier arrangement was done for Art’s sake. Not so, not even close. There are a few poems that could have been dropped as weak (“Barren Woman” and “Magi” being agreed upon examples), but overall the restored poems are very strong. Moreover, it’s their placement that matters. If Plath’s collection was an act of literary revenge, Hughes' editing was an also an act of literary violence. He deliberately muddied the waters, blurring the impact of the collection as a whole. You see this in both the beginning and ending of the collection. The new edition follows an arc, an arc that, with all its ferocious savagery, strangely enough becomes transcendent with the last grouping of poems, which ends with “Wintering.” In the earlier edition of Ariel, Hughes has these poems (starting with “Daddy”) in sequence, but then tacked on a monkey’s tail grab bag of poems that robs the reader of the sense of closure that Plath’s arrangement provides. (It also helps to dilute the impact of the accusatory “Daddy.”)
But it’s the beginning that really shocked me. The dropping of “The Rabbit Catcher,” a very strong poem, and one that must of burned Hughes' ears right off, is where the violence to Plath’s purpose is most obvious. It’s a key poem, since it establishes a foundation for the recurring accusatory poems (“A Secret,” “The Jailer,” “Daddy,” and I’m sure others), and these poems are part of an intended tapestry. I have no doubt that this restored version of Ariel will be the one that will now be studied, argued over, etc., from now on. Hughes' deceptive version will also be studied, but it will exist now as a footnote. It’s a testimony to the power of Plath’s poems that Ariel can exist in both forms, but there is no doubt which is the better version.
And I don’t think this can be downplayed in any way. Frieda Hughes, the couple’s daughter, says so clearly in her (indispensible) Introduction, acknowledging (what we all know) that Ariel is an act of revenge. For Frieda, this is a difficult and sensitive subject. She loved her father, she loved her mother. She does try to recycle – though she doesn’t necessarily agree -- the old Hughes argument that the earlier arrangement was done for Art’s sake. Not so, not even close. There are a few poems that could have been dropped as weak (“Barren Woman” and “Magi” being agreed upon examples), but overall the restored poems are very strong. Moreover, it’s their placement that matters. If Plath’s collection was an act of literary revenge, Hughes' editing was an also an act of literary violence. He deliberately muddied the waters, blurring the impact of the collection as a whole. You see this in both the beginning and ending of the collection. The new edition follows an arc, an arc that, with all its ferocious savagery, strangely enough becomes transcendent with the last grouping of poems, which ends with “Wintering.” In the earlier edition of Ariel, Hughes has these poems (starting with “Daddy”) in sequence, but then tacked on a monkey’s tail grab bag of poems that robs the reader of the sense of closure that Plath’s arrangement provides. (It also helps to dilute the impact of the accusatory “Daddy.”)
But it’s the beginning that really shocked me. The dropping of “The Rabbit Catcher,” a very strong poem, and one that must of burned Hughes' ears right off, is where the violence to Plath’s purpose is most obvious. It’s a key poem, since it establishes a foundation for the recurring accusatory poems (“A Secret,” “The Jailer,” “Daddy,” and I’m sure others), and these poems are part of an intended tapestry. I have no doubt that this restored version of Ariel will be the one that will now be studied, argued over, etc., from now on. Hughes' deceptive version will also be studied, but it will exist now as a footnote. It’s a testimony to the power of Plath’s poems that Ariel can exist in both forms, but there is no doubt which is the better version.
December 28, 2011
I have always meant to read a book about the life of Sylvia Plath and to learn about the whole Ted Hughes adventure – but something there is that doesn’t love that kind of voyeurism and to date I have avoided it. There is a sense, however, where I think Plath’s poetry is so intensely personal that it would make sense to read it knowing more of the story of the American poet who killed herself on the bleak winter’s day in the year in which I was born.
This ‘reinstatement’ of Plath’s Ariel has a foreword by Frieda Hughes, her daughter. It is a touching and interesting introduction to the poems and to the significance of a life as seen by her daughter.
Frieda makes some interesting comments about the nature of art, poetry and artist – and other collective creations. The most interesting of all is how much we like to pretend we ‘know’ an artist by their poetry – but too often it works the other way around and the artist becomes a shadow we think of as being filled out by their poems. My favourite example of this is Beethoven who wrote both the forth and fifth symphonies at exactly the same time. If they were a reflection of his mood at the time then clearly he suffered from some kind of multiple personality disorder.
This collection of poems contains some of Plath’s most disturbing and confronting poems. Daddy, for example, and Lady Lazarus are terribly difficult poems to read, even if they are perhaps the easiest poems to understand in this collection – they are raw and yet crafted at the same time. Plath more than any other poet is to be read aloud. These are poems that work as music and getting the music of the poems right is an important part of ‘getting’ the poems.
The book also contains a series of ‘Facsimile drafts of the poem “Ariel”’ and there are eleven versions of the poem reprinted here. There is a terrible idea that people who do not know much about poetry believe that a great poet is somehow someone who can pop off a poem in one go and there it sits before them complete and perfect. This is rarely, if ever the case. A writer only becomes a writer when they learn that the creative process is a process. And most importantly, that that process is iterative. It is also important to think that if she spent quite so long writing the poem it might pay to spend a proportionate amount of time reading the poem.
Before we go, I want to quote Plath’s, Tulips:
The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
And my history to the anaesthetist and my body to surgeons.
They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff
Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.
Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.
The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,
They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,
Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,
So it is impossible to tell how many there are.
My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage ----
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.
I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat
Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.
They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.
Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley
I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books
Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.
I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.
I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free ----
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.
The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down,
Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their colour,
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.
Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.
Before they came the air was calm enough,
Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.
Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river
Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.
They concentrate my attention, that was happy
Playing and resting without committing itself.
The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.
The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;
They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,
And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.
One night when I was in the middle years of high school I was staying overnight at a friends house and we were doing home work and smoking cigarettes and we had a poem we needed to have read for English the next day. It was Plath’s Tulips and it was insanely difficult – infinitely more difficult than perhaps is reasonable to expect two 16-year-old boys (or there-abouts) to read and understand. Anyway, we were science nerds and poetry was far too other-worldly for us. All the same, I was madly in love with my English teacher and was keen to impress by coming to some understanding of the poem.
I remember we started reading it and could make no sense of it at all. So, we stopped and went through it line by line, stopping at the end of each line and talking about what it could all mean. It was a slog, but suddenly we started getting a sense of the woman in the poem being in hospital and then of all that blood.
I have read this poem hundreds of times since that night. About ten years ago I decided that it ought to be read in much the same voice that you might read these lines from TS Eliot:
My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
'I never know what you are thinking. Think.'
You know, neurotic. But I now think that is quite a wrong reading of the poem. I think the right reading (at least at the moment) is quite a straight and calm voice, but with a hint of perplexity in the tone, but only a hint, just enough to be detectable, and no more. Much the way Maggie Smith does Love Among the Lentils by Alan Bennett.
If I was to give advice on coming to this poem for the first time – obviously you need to pay close attention to the relationship between the woman in the poem and the ‘others’ in the poem, all of the others, not least the tulips themselves. But also the nurses and the nuns and those who are implied as being there even if they never actually are. And then how often red and white are contrasted and how red on white is so often about blood in our culture and in this poem. And of course, water and all the things that water can signify.
I love the way an act of love by someone (in sending tulips) can become like a series of hooks dug into the flesh of the person they are sent to. I love how peacefulness had previously meant avoiding being noticed and in becoming white and then the sudden redness of the tulips disturbs all that. How they stop being inanimate and become like wild animals needing to be put behind bars. I love how the tulips become the projection of this woman’s incredibly complex relationship with her husband and children. “They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations” and look at that word ‘associations’ – what a terribly important word that is. For that is what the tulips do not allow her – to remain clear of her associations.
This is a complex poem and one that requires a careful study of the imagery and most important, a feeling for the music of the words on the page. It is, and has been for a very long time, one of my very favourite poems.
Bird Brian has started a page here http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/2... of reviewers reading their reviews.
This is my effort: http://soundcloud.com/tremcc/audio-re...
This ‘reinstatement’ of Plath’s Ariel has a foreword by Frieda Hughes, her daughter. It is a touching and interesting introduction to the poems and to the significance of a life as seen by her daughter.
Frieda makes some interesting comments about the nature of art, poetry and artist – and other collective creations. The most interesting of all is how much we like to pretend we ‘know’ an artist by their poetry – but too often it works the other way around and the artist becomes a shadow we think of as being filled out by their poems. My favourite example of this is Beethoven who wrote both the forth and fifth symphonies at exactly the same time. If they were a reflection of his mood at the time then clearly he suffered from some kind of multiple personality disorder.
This collection of poems contains some of Plath’s most disturbing and confronting poems. Daddy, for example, and Lady Lazarus are terribly difficult poems to read, even if they are perhaps the easiest poems to understand in this collection – they are raw and yet crafted at the same time. Plath more than any other poet is to be read aloud. These are poems that work as music and getting the music of the poems right is an important part of ‘getting’ the poems.
The book also contains a series of ‘Facsimile drafts of the poem “Ariel”’ and there are eleven versions of the poem reprinted here. There is a terrible idea that people who do not know much about poetry believe that a great poet is somehow someone who can pop off a poem in one go and there it sits before them complete and perfect. This is rarely, if ever the case. A writer only becomes a writer when they learn that the creative process is a process. And most importantly, that that process is iterative. It is also important to think that if she spent quite so long writing the poem it might pay to spend a proportionate amount of time reading the poem.
Before we go, I want to quote Plath’s, Tulips:
The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
And my history to the anaesthetist and my body to surgeons.
They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff
Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.
Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.
The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,
They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,
Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,
So it is impossible to tell how many there are.
My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage ----
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.
I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat
Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.
They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.
Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley
I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books
Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.
I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.
I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free ----
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.
The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down,
Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their colour,
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.
Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.
Before they came the air was calm enough,
Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.
Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river
Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.
They concentrate my attention, that was happy
Playing and resting without committing itself.
The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.
The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;
They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,
And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.
One night when I was in the middle years of high school I was staying overnight at a friends house and we were doing home work and smoking cigarettes and we had a poem we needed to have read for English the next day. It was Plath’s Tulips and it was insanely difficult – infinitely more difficult than perhaps is reasonable to expect two 16-year-old boys (or there-abouts) to read and understand. Anyway, we were science nerds and poetry was far too other-worldly for us. All the same, I was madly in love with my English teacher and was keen to impress by coming to some understanding of the poem.
I remember we started reading it and could make no sense of it at all. So, we stopped and went through it line by line, stopping at the end of each line and talking about what it could all mean. It was a slog, but suddenly we started getting a sense of the woman in the poem being in hospital and then of all that blood.
I have read this poem hundreds of times since that night. About ten years ago I decided that it ought to be read in much the same voice that you might read these lines from TS Eliot:
My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
'I never know what you are thinking. Think.'
You know, neurotic. But I now think that is quite a wrong reading of the poem. I think the right reading (at least at the moment) is quite a straight and calm voice, but with a hint of perplexity in the tone, but only a hint, just enough to be detectable, and no more. Much the way Maggie Smith does Love Among the Lentils by Alan Bennett.
If I was to give advice on coming to this poem for the first time – obviously you need to pay close attention to the relationship between the woman in the poem and the ‘others’ in the poem, all of the others, not least the tulips themselves. But also the nurses and the nuns and those who are implied as being there even if they never actually are. And then how often red and white are contrasted and how red on white is so often about blood in our culture and in this poem. And of course, water and all the things that water can signify.
I love the way an act of love by someone (in sending tulips) can become like a series of hooks dug into the flesh of the person they are sent to. I love how peacefulness had previously meant avoiding being noticed and in becoming white and then the sudden redness of the tulips disturbs all that. How they stop being inanimate and become like wild animals needing to be put behind bars. I love how the tulips become the projection of this woman’s incredibly complex relationship with her husband and children. “They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations” and look at that word ‘associations’ – what a terribly important word that is. For that is what the tulips do not allow her – to remain clear of her associations.
This is a complex poem and one that requires a careful study of the imagery and most important, a feeling for the music of the words on the page. It is, and has been for a very long time, one of my very favourite poems.
Bird Brian has started a page here http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/2... of reviewers reading their reviews.
This is my effort: http://soundcloud.com/tremcc/audio-re...
April 18, 2018
A reread for me, because I wanted to read a new book of poetry that is in conversation with this one. This edition has some facsimile in the back of Sylvia's drafts, and some original versions that were of course edited by her husband.
Lady Lazarus is still one of my favorite poems, with this final stanza (if I can use that for a poem):
"Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air."
Lady Lazarus is still one of my favorite poems, with this final stanza (if I can use that for a poem):
"Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air."
August 2, 2022
I loved this version better than the one originally published by her husband, Ted Hughes. Her symbols and recurring themes stand out-- death, mausoleums, purity, whiteness, red, flowers, the moon, blackness. Rebirth. It's stunning how I feel more at one with her vision- I can appreciate experiencing her from this perspective, the way she herself chose and arranged them.. it shows her in full control of her artistry. Although Frieda explains her father's editorial decisions it is understandable that she defend him but not satisfactory. The energy- overall- feels different. Some of them hit hard. But as Sylvia always circled back to the symbolism of winter to spring- it is felt and experienced as she meant here.
November 10, 2015
Final rating: 3.5 stars
Last May I went on a cruise to Alaska with my parents, brother, and grandfather. The book I was reading at the time was crap. Fortunately for me, there was this freaking cool library on the ship.
I'm going to go off on bit of a tangent here, but I think it's kinda lame how a cruise ship has a library and the island I live on hasn't had one since I was eight.
...Anyway, moving away from my general bitterness, let's go back the library. So I picked up this cool book called The Bell Jar. I enjoyed it so much that it became a favourite. Reading "Mad Girl's Love Song" made me more interested in Plath's poetry, so reading this was sort of bound to happen.
This book was probably longer than it actually needed to be. All the poems in the first part are repeated in the second part, which is a facsimile of Plath's manuscript with all of her edits and scribblings. The first part is just like the second part, except it's corrected. A lot of the poems in this book honestly made no sense to me until I analysed them. Most caught my attention, but few held it. "The Jailor" and "A Birthday Present" were so interesting and made me want to know how they'd end. "Lady Lazarus" took me back to the first time I read "Mad Girl's Love Song", while "Daddy" is very resentful and gripping. I also adored "Lesbos", "Elm", and (in some ways) "Wintering". I don't think I'm really geared towards poetry, but Plath does an exceptional job even when you don't know what the hell she's going on about and have to add "analysis" to the end of every Google search. What can be said about this book is that it really sets a certain tone throughout. It's a bit dark and depressing, but simultaneously rich and full of emotion. You have to be in the right mood to read it, but it's never anything less than beautiful. I tend to only keep five-star books on my bookshelf, but despite its imperfections, this book had quite a few gems, so it's a keeper.
Last May I went on a cruise to Alaska with my parents, brother, and grandfather. The book I was reading at the time was crap. Fortunately for me, there was this freaking cool library on the ship.
I'm going to go off on bit of a tangent here, but I think it's kinda lame how a cruise ship has a library and the island I live on hasn't had one since I was eight.
...Anyway, moving away from my general bitterness, let's go back the library. So I picked up this cool book called The Bell Jar. I enjoyed it so much that it became a favourite. Reading "Mad Girl's Love Song" made me more interested in Plath's poetry, so reading this was sort of bound to happen.
This book was probably longer than it actually needed to be. All the poems in the first part are repeated in the second part, which is a facsimile of Plath's manuscript with all of her edits and scribblings. The first part is just like the second part, except it's corrected. A lot of the poems in this book honestly made no sense to me until I analysed them. Most caught my attention, but few held it. "The Jailor" and "A Birthday Present" were so interesting and made me want to know how they'd end. "Lady Lazarus" took me back to the first time I read "Mad Girl's Love Song", while "Daddy" is very resentful and gripping. I also adored "Lesbos", "Elm", and (in some ways) "Wintering". I don't think I'm really geared towards poetry, but Plath does an exceptional job even when you don't know what the hell she's going on about and have to add "analysis" to the end of every Google search. What can be said about this book is that it really sets a certain tone throughout. It's a bit dark and depressing, but simultaneously rich and full of emotion. You have to be in the right mood to read it, but it's never anything less than beautiful. I tend to only keep five-star books on my bookshelf, but despite its imperfections, this book had quite a few gems, so it's a keeper.
June 23, 2017
I thought her book, The Bell Jar, was much better than any of these poems. I almost wish she had been more of a novelist than a poet. Oh well. Either way, maybe two of these poems stuck out to me in a good way but then the rest were very strange and random. Honestly, I didn't connect to her poems the way I did with her novel, so that was a bummer.
Overall, they're definitely poems to check out if you have time. But don't be expecting Emily Dickinson or anything like that, because you'll be disappointed.
Overall, they're definitely poems to check out if you have time. But don't be expecting Emily Dickinson or anything like that, because you'll be disappointed.
January 26, 2018
* Also on my blog.
January 2, 2023
Reading poetry has always felt like futile detective work for me, so I was pleasantly surprised by the impact this collection had on me!
“Ariel”, Sylvia Plath’s most famous poetry collection, was written in a “blood jet” of creativity shortly before she committed suicide in 1963. The collection charts her emotional turmoil in the wake of her disintegrating marriage, the claustrophobic effects of domesticity, the salve of motherhood, and her conflicting attractions to both rebirth and self-destruction.
After her death, her husband Ted Hughes became the curator of the (unpublished) Ariel poems and unfortunately “sanitized” the collection by removing what he deemed “confrontational” poems and replacing them with other “less offensive” poems. These missing poems, released in later collections, included those that portrayed him in a negative light (e.g. “The Jailer”, “The Rabbit Catcher”), commented on his infidelity (e.g. “A Secret”, “The Other”, “The Detective”), or insulted acquaintances of the couple (e.g. “Lesbos”).
This restored edition (published recently in 2004) for the first time reinstates Plath’s original arrangement. I personally found the “missing” poems to be some of the most raw and evocative of the lot. For example, in “The Rabbit Catcher”, Plath describes a windy walk in the wild in which she comes across rabbit snares and imagines the game keeper waiting with almost sexual anticipation for the death of his prey. The symbol of the rabbit snares evolves into a metaphor for her marriage towards the end of the poem:
And we too had a relationship -
Tight wires between us,
Pegs too deep to uproot, and a mind like a ring
Sliding shut on some quick thing,
The constriction killing me also.
In another poem, "The Courage of Shutting-Up", Plath describes the trauma of public silence on her husband's affair. Her tongue is compared to a relic that has been dried and hung up, like taxidermy, and she likens this state of forced silence to that of:
A country no longer heard of,
An obstinate independency
Insolvent among the mountains.
Many of the poems in this collection crackle with vivid, inventive imagery, explosive symbolism and memorable opening lines (e.g. My night sweats grease his breakfast plate as the opening to “The Jailor”). While reading, I could easily spend an entire evening dissecting a single poem, mining the various layers of meaning and supplementing with online research.
Overall, this was a moving, unsettling and illuminating reading experience, well worth the effort, and highly recommended, even for poetry virgins like me.
Mood: Melancholy and hopeful to equal degrees
Rating: 9/10
Also on Instagram.
“Ariel”, Sylvia Plath’s most famous poetry collection, was written in a “blood jet” of creativity shortly before she committed suicide in 1963. The collection charts her emotional turmoil in the wake of her disintegrating marriage, the claustrophobic effects of domesticity, the salve of motherhood, and her conflicting attractions to both rebirth and self-destruction.
After her death, her husband Ted Hughes became the curator of the (unpublished) Ariel poems and unfortunately “sanitized” the collection by removing what he deemed “confrontational” poems and replacing them with other “less offensive” poems. These missing poems, released in later collections, included those that portrayed him in a negative light (e.g. “The Jailer”, “The Rabbit Catcher”), commented on his infidelity (e.g. “A Secret”, “The Other”, “The Detective”), or insulted acquaintances of the couple (e.g. “Lesbos”).
This restored edition (published recently in 2004) for the first time reinstates Plath’s original arrangement. I personally found the “missing” poems to be some of the most raw and evocative of the lot. For example, in “The Rabbit Catcher”, Plath describes a windy walk in the wild in which she comes across rabbit snares and imagines the game keeper waiting with almost sexual anticipation for the death of his prey. The symbol of the rabbit snares evolves into a metaphor for her marriage towards the end of the poem:
And we too had a relationship -
Tight wires between us,
Pegs too deep to uproot, and a mind like a ring
Sliding shut on some quick thing,
The constriction killing me also.
In another poem, "The Courage of Shutting-Up", Plath describes the trauma of public silence on her husband's affair. Her tongue is compared to a relic that has been dried and hung up, like taxidermy, and she likens this state of forced silence to that of:
A country no longer heard of,
An obstinate independency
Insolvent among the mountains.
Many of the poems in this collection crackle with vivid, inventive imagery, explosive symbolism and memorable opening lines (e.g. My night sweats grease his breakfast plate as the opening to “The Jailor”). While reading, I could easily spend an entire evening dissecting a single poem, mining the various layers of meaning and supplementing with online research.
Overall, this was a moving, unsettling and illuminating reading experience, well worth the effort, and highly recommended, even for poetry virgins like me.
Mood: Melancholy and hopeful to equal degrees
Rating: 9/10
Also on Instagram.
February 6, 2017
Maybe when I first read Ariel, the originally published, Ted Hughes edition of the poems, I was too young to appreciate Plath's stunning vision; however, I'm inclined to think that her own layout of her swansong collection was the decisive factor in my recent reading of the work, which blew me away.
So much substance - the words 'dark matter' come to mind - from a poet so young, it's rare, it's humbling. Being Greek, I can only think of Karyotakis's last collection, though Plath is a clearly seperate case, since self-destruction was to her more of a precise art, a science, almost.
I urge readers, be they familiar with Plath or not, to give the Restored Edition a try. This book has brought considerable beauty into my life; it's one of those reads whose lingering feeling is that of a profound gratitude.
So much substance - the words 'dark matter' come to mind - from a poet so young, it's rare, it's humbling. Being Greek, I can only think of Karyotakis's last collection, though Plath is a clearly seperate case, since self-destruction was to her more of a precise art, a science, almost.
I urge readers, be they familiar with Plath or not, to give the Restored Edition a try. This book has brought considerable beauty into my life; it's one of those reads whose lingering feeling is that of a profound gratitude.
August 3, 2025
‘When she died leaving ‘Ariel’ as her last book, she was caught in the act of revenge, in a voice that had been honed and practised for years, latterly with the help of my father. Though he became a victim of it, ultimately he did not shy away from its mastery.’
Frieda Hughes, in the foreword to this edition.
A luminous and illuminating addition to balance the darkness of the Plath archive.
Frieda Hughes, in the foreword to this edition.
A luminous and illuminating addition to balance the darkness of the Plath archive.
April 11, 2016
There are two adjectives commonly applied to this book by people who haven't read it: it is often said to be a "feminist" book, and a "depressing" one. I think these two not-quite-accurate labels arise so frequently because Sylvia Plath is, unfortunately, better-known to the general public for being female and psychologically troubled than for being an accomplished poet.
This is not an agenda-driven book, it is not a book aimed at only a select audience, and it is, above all, not a depressing book. "Ariel" contains poems of awe ("Morning Song"), poems of biting irony ("The Applicant"), and poems of exhilaration so intense that it blurs the line between wanting to live and wanting to die ("Ariel"), but in all of these poems Plath's fighting spirit is evident. The anger, the rage, the *bite* of the poems about her reaction to her husband's adultery seem to me to be the mark of someone who is fighting so hard to reclaim her life because she so desperately wants to live. These are *not* the poems of someone who has turned her face to the wall and resigned herself to defeat. "I am too pure for you or anyone," she asserts (with a defiant head-toss, perhaps) in one poem. In another poem, one that tells of a swarm of bees that kamikaze-attacked a man (to punish him for his "lies," it would seem), she says, "They thought death was worth it, but I/Have a self to recover, a queen." This "queen" of the bees is transparently a symbol for Plath's inner self, which had hitherto been lain dormant beneath the weighty tarps of depression, and it is described in language that is harrowingly alive, evoking metaphors of healing and resurrection: "Now she is flying/More terrible than she ever was, red/Scar in the sky, red comet/Over the engine that killed her--/The mausoleum, the wax house." In short, these are forcefully galloping, life-affirming poems. Just as some people lose their battles against cancer or other diseases, Plath ultimately lost her battle against depression, but these poems suggest that it wasn't for lack of trying. The final poem in this restored edition speaks of how the battle was a close one, whose outcome was still in question up until the very end: "This is the time of hanging on.... Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas/Succeed in banking their fires/To enter another year?/What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?/The bees are flying. They taste the spring."
This is not an agenda-driven book, it is not a book aimed at only a select audience, and it is, above all, not a depressing book. "Ariel" contains poems of awe ("Morning Song"), poems of biting irony ("The Applicant"), and poems of exhilaration so intense that it blurs the line between wanting to live and wanting to die ("Ariel"), but in all of these poems Plath's fighting spirit is evident. The anger, the rage, the *bite* of the poems about her reaction to her husband's adultery seem to me to be the mark of someone who is fighting so hard to reclaim her life because she so desperately wants to live. These are *not* the poems of someone who has turned her face to the wall and resigned herself to defeat. "I am too pure for you or anyone," she asserts (with a defiant head-toss, perhaps) in one poem. In another poem, one that tells of a swarm of bees that kamikaze-attacked a man (to punish him for his "lies," it would seem), she says, "They thought death was worth it, but I/Have a self to recover, a queen." This "queen" of the bees is transparently a symbol for Plath's inner self, which had hitherto been lain dormant beneath the weighty tarps of depression, and it is described in language that is harrowingly alive, evoking metaphors of healing and resurrection: "Now she is flying/More terrible than she ever was, red/Scar in the sky, red comet/Over the engine that killed her--/The mausoleum, the wax house." In short, these are forcefully galloping, life-affirming poems. Just as some people lose their battles against cancer or other diseases, Plath ultimately lost her battle against depression, but these poems suggest that it wasn't for lack of trying. The final poem in this restored edition speaks of how the battle was a close one, whose outcome was still in question up until the very end: "This is the time of hanging on.... Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas/Succeed in banking their fires/To enter another year?/What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?/The bees are flying. They taste the spring."
September 8, 2021
Intense, merciless, wielding words like sword, it's dark up there, in there, howling screams of despair and whipping lashes of acidic rage.
Well, what do you think of that?
Naked as paper to start
But in twenty-five years she'll be silver,
In fifty, gold.
A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk.
Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.
- The Applicant
I am myself. That is not enough.
My ribs show. What have I eaten?
Lies and smiles.
Surely the sky is not that color,
Surely the grass should be rippling.
- The Jailor
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.
- Lady Lazarus
What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful?
It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges?
I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way.
Now there are these veils, shimmering like curtains
Can you not give it to me?
Do not be ashamed — I do not mind if it is small.
If you only knew how the veils were killing my days.
To you they are only transparencies, clear air.
But my god, the clouds are like cotton.
Armies of them. They are carbon monoxide.
Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole?
Must you stamp each piece purple,
Must you kill what you can?
- A Birthday Present
Other rawest favorite poems including The Couriers, The Rabbit Catcher, Tulips, Ariel, The Courage of Shutting-Up, Medusa, Daddy.
Well, what do you think of that?
Naked as paper to start
But in twenty-five years she'll be silver,
In fifty, gold.
A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk.
Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.
- The Applicant
I am myself. That is not enough.
My ribs show. What have I eaten?
Lies and smiles.
Surely the sky is not that color,
Surely the grass should be rippling.
- The Jailor
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.
- Lady Lazarus
What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful?
It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges?
I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way.
Now there are these veils, shimmering like curtains
Can you not give it to me?
Do not be ashamed — I do not mind if it is small.
If you only knew how the veils were killing my days.
To you they are only transparencies, clear air.
But my god, the clouds are like cotton.
Armies of them. They are carbon monoxide.
Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole?
Must you stamp each piece purple,
Must you kill what you can?
- A Birthday Present
Other rawest favorite poems including The Couriers, The Rabbit Catcher, Tulips, Ariel, The Courage of Shutting-Up, Medusa, Daddy.
January 11, 2021
Unpopular opinion: Plath is talented but overrated.
December 31, 2021
"εισαι το μονο στερεο πραγμα και πανω σου ακουμπα ζηλοφθονο το συμπαν"
Το βιβλιο αυτο ολοκληρωνει τη λιστα των οσων καταφερα να διαβασω για φετος. Ηθελα πολυ να κλεισω αυτη την αναγνωστικη χρονια με ενα τοσο σπουδαιο βιβλιο που αποτελει τη συλλογη ποιηματων της λατρεμενης μου Πλαθ. Ποιηματα που οπως αναφερει κ η Πλαθ στο παραρτημα," καποια γραφτηκαν στις 4 το πρωι, εκεινη την ασαλευτη, γαλαζια σχεδον ωρα πριν απο το λαλημα του κοκορα, πριν το κλαμα του μωρου, πριν την κουδουνιστη μουσικη του γαλατα.. ". Με λιγα λογια εκει που η Πλαθ καθοταν μονη, απεναντι στο αδιαμφισβητητο ταλεντο της, στις σκεψεις της, πολλες φορες σκοτεινες, που ομως μας εδωσαν ποιηματα αληθινα, τρομακτικα, με απιστευτο imagery αντλωμενο απο εκει που λιγοι μπορούν να φτασουν. Λιγο πριν μπει στο κοστουμι, στο ρολο που υποχρεωθηκε απο τον εαυτο της, αλλα και απο τα βιωματα της να μπει, καταπιεσμενη απο τα πρεπει της κοινωνιας. Για μενα, ποιηματα οπως το daddy, lady lazarus, nick and the candlestick και death and co. ειναι απλα, αριστουργηματα.
Η εκδοση αυτη ειναι απολαυστικη, δινοντας τη δυνατοτητα στον αναγνωστη να διαβασει τα ποιηματα τοσο στα αγγλικα, οσο και στην εξαιρετικη ελληνικη μεταφραση, ενω η εισαγωγη της κορης της Πλαθ, ειναι το κερασακι στην τουρτα. Ενα βιβλιο που πραγματικα θα στολισει την βιβλιοθηκη μου...
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟/5 αστερια
Το βιβλιο αυτο ολοκληρωνει τη λιστα των οσων καταφερα να διαβασω για φετος. Ηθελα πολυ να κλεισω αυτη την αναγνωστικη χρονια με ενα τοσο σπουδαιο βιβλιο που αποτελει τη συλλογη ποιηματων της λατρεμενης μου Πλαθ. Ποιηματα που οπως αναφερει κ η Πλαθ στο παραρτημα," καποια γραφτηκαν στις 4 το πρωι, εκεινη την ασαλευτη, γαλαζια σχεδον ωρα πριν απο το λαλημα του κοκορα, πριν το κλαμα του μωρου, πριν την κουδουνιστη μουσικη του γαλατα.. ". Με λιγα λογια εκει που η Πλαθ καθοταν μονη, απεναντι στο αδιαμφισβητητο ταλεντο της, στις σκεψεις της, πολλες φορες σκοτεινες, που ομως μας εδωσαν ποιηματα αληθινα, τρομακτικα, με απιστευτο imagery αντλωμενο απο εκει που λιγοι μπορούν να φτασουν. Λιγο πριν μπει στο κοστουμι, στο ρολο που υποχρεωθηκε απο τον εαυτο της, αλλα και απο τα βιωματα της να μπει, καταπιεσμενη απο τα πρεπει της κοινωνιας. Για μενα, ποιηματα οπως το daddy, lady lazarus, nick and the candlestick και death and co. ειναι απλα, αριστουργηματα.
Η εκδοση αυτη ειναι απολαυστικη, δινοντας τη δυνατοτητα στον αναγνωστη να διαβασει τα ποιηματα τοσο στα αγγλικα, οσο και στην εξαιρετικη ελληνικη μεταφραση, ενω η εισαγωγη της κορης της Πλαθ, ειναι το κερασακι στην τουρτα. Ενα βιβλιο που πραγματικα θα στολισει την βιβλιοθηκη μου...
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟/5 αστερια
May 26, 2017
The poems in this collection are seething and uncompromising. Plath's use of color fascinates me, and reading these sparkling, corrosive poems aloud makes your tongue and ear dance. But being completely honest, I found a lot of them impenetrable without research. I just had absolutely no idea what was going on, and so couldn't remember most of them after I'd turned the page (with some notable exceptions like "Lady Lazarus"). I'm left with a lot of internal questions about the place of biography, intention, and writer/reader communication in poetry.
February 11, 2015
I've been having trouble organizing my thoughts and reactions to Plath, so here's a list in no particular order of some things that I wondered while reading Ariel. To all you Plathers: please understand that I respect Plath as a poet, that my rating reflects my limited perception of her work, and that I'm well aware of the subjectivity of taste. However...
1. What exactly is so great about Sylvia Plath? I don't mean that sarcastically, I mean what are Sylvia Plath's literary innovations, her credentials for being referred to as great? Formal invention? Subject matter? What is it? Ezra Pound is great because he initiated a literary paradigm shift from stodgy Victorian poetry to something fresh and exciting and new. Chaucer is great because of his uncanny command of Middle English and his diverse influence on other great writers (Pound himself being one of them). How did Plath make poetry new? More importantly: did she? I don't see much in terms of traditional forms in the book (sonnets, sestinas, and the like), and much of the book is —or appears to be— free verse. However, I think there are other poets who can write much better free verse than Plath (Pound, H.D., Eliot, Ashbery, Jarrell, and the like). So, in terms of craft, how is Plath great? Why should we read her?
2. Many people, but especially Americans like myself, have an obsession with the role of the Artist Martyr, a young soul full of tortured creativity who dies a tragic death, leaving us wondering what works they might have produced had they lived longer (looking at you, Jimi). To me, Plath's psychological problems and her untimely, disturbing death has shrouded her work in a sort of perceived mystery and haunting power. Or rather I should say that Plath fans have intentionally shrouded her work with such a facade. Quite frankly, I don't get it. What if Plath had lived a long, healthy life? Would this influence the way we read her work? Should it?
3. I keep hearing that one shouldn't write about love or death. This is ridiculous. I think one can write about either, so long as the writing is excellent, original, innovative in some capacity. Plath writes frequently about death, but does so in a way that I found unforgettably boring, which is quite ironic considering the realities of her life. Her work on death sometimes borders a juvenile obsession, like a teenager first coming to grips with her own mortality, but having little of substance to say about the whole experience.
4. Plath's work seemed to me more cerebral than aortic, more about the mind and its strangeness than anything else of human experience. That's fine. And perhaps this explains some of her style. Is she deliberately trying to disorient the reader, to use her art to imitate psychological instability? I like this idea. I like it because it provides some validation of her form, her voice, her unusual juxtaposition of images. But why then, when finishing each and every poem, did I feel nothing, think nothing, save for a vague suspicion that I had just wasted a bunch of time? Perhaps I'm just uncultured and uninitiated?
5. When I read something that resonates with me, it resonates with me because I learned something, and not just about the story or the characters or the craft of writing. All that's great. But it resonated with me because I learned something about myself. When I finished this book, I spent a few days mulling it over. I realized I had learned nothing, taken nothing away from Plath's work that informed my perception of myself or others, didn't provoke new ideas or explore emotional depths. The whole experience felt flat and lifeless, disconnected, incoherent and, I admit, rather irritating.
1. What exactly is so great about Sylvia Plath? I don't mean that sarcastically, I mean what are Sylvia Plath's literary innovations, her credentials for being referred to as great? Formal invention? Subject matter? What is it? Ezra Pound is great because he initiated a literary paradigm shift from stodgy Victorian poetry to something fresh and exciting and new. Chaucer is great because of his uncanny command of Middle English and his diverse influence on other great writers (Pound himself being one of them). How did Plath make poetry new? More importantly: did she? I don't see much in terms of traditional forms in the book (sonnets, sestinas, and the like), and much of the book is —or appears to be— free verse. However, I think there are other poets who can write much better free verse than Plath (Pound, H.D., Eliot, Ashbery, Jarrell, and the like). So, in terms of craft, how is Plath great? Why should we read her?
2. Many people, but especially Americans like myself, have an obsession with the role of the Artist Martyr, a young soul full of tortured creativity who dies a tragic death, leaving us wondering what works they might have produced had they lived longer (looking at you, Jimi). To me, Plath's psychological problems and her untimely, disturbing death has shrouded her work in a sort of perceived mystery and haunting power. Or rather I should say that Plath fans have intentionally shrouded her work with such a facade. Quite frankly, I don't get it. What if Plath had lived a long, healthy life? Would this influence the way we read her work? Should it?
3. I keep hearing that one shouldn't write about love or death. This is ridiculous. I think one can write about either, so long as the writing is excellent, original, innovative in some capacity. Plath writes frequently about death, but does so in a way that I found unforgettably boring, which is quite ironic considering the realities of her life. Her work on death sometimes borders a juvenile obsession, like a teenager first coming to grips with her own mortality, but having little of substance to say about the whole experience.
4. Plath's work seemed to me more cerebral than aortic, more about the mind and its strangeness than anything else of human experience. That's fine. And perhaps this explains some of her style. Is she deliberately trying to disorient the reader, to use her art to imitate psychological instability? I like this idea. I like it because it provides some validation of her form, her voice, her unusual juxtaposition of images. But why then, when finishing each and every poem, did I feel nothing, think nothing, save for a vague suspicion that I had just wasted a bunch of time? Perhaps I'm just uncultured and uninitiated?
5. When I read something that resonates with me, it resonates with me because I learned something, and not just about the story or the characters or the craft of writing. All that's great. But it resonated with me because I learned something about myself. When I finished this book, I spent a few days mulling it over. I realized I had learned nothing, taken nothing away from Plath's work that informed my perception of myself or others, didn't provoke new ideas or explore emotional depths. The whole experience felt flat and lifeless, disconnected, incoherent and, I admit, rather irritating.
June 22, 2022
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I really wanted to love this, but it was just to depressing for my taste.
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I really wanted to love this, but it was just to depressing for my taste.
January 1, 2023
2.5 - tout juste à temps pour mon 100e de l'année :')))
faves:
the applicant
lady lazarus (2)
cut
elm
poppies in october
getting there (2)
the moon and the yew tree
a birthday present (2) (3)
faves:
the applicant
lady lazarus (2)
cut
elm
poppies in october
getting there (2)
the moon and the yew tree
a birthday present (2) (3)
November 27, 2024
Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances
- Ariel, Sylvia Plath
I fell back in love with Sylvia Plath with these fascinatingly complex and morbid poems - but I think I fell in love with Frieda Hughes along the way, with her beautifully composed foreword, eloquent interview, and her singular vitriolic poem at the end of this collection. So I'm going to review them both.
If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
- The Rival, Sylvia Plath
I have over a hundred highlights from this book and a newfound appreciation for poetry anthologies. Each poem by Plath drips raw creativity, passion, and depressive emotion (and savage vitriol towards her adulterous husband, her parents, and society). In the collection, they drill home the beauty of these emotions compounded and referenced across poems, with complex imagery, which constructs a landscape as inventive as any fantasy. Frieda Hughes said it best:
She used every emotional experience as if it were a scrap of material that could be pieced together to make a wonderful dress; she wasted nothing of what she felt, and when in control of those tumultuous feelings she was able to focus and direct her incredible poetic energy to great effect.
Plath's poems are searing indictments of the world, vicious at times, and hold nothing back. They are both autobiographical and masterful scene construction, hiding her message in fiction. At other times, her poems are sinisterly prophetic of her future, of the carbon monoxide that caused her death, the year that she died, and the morbid voyeurism that will follow her story for decades. Of course, her poems include loving praises of her children, nature, and animals, but these often co-exist with darker subtexts in the very next verse. There are truly worlds hidden in this collection, which are a delight to sink into. I can't include all my favorite verses here, because that would be a couple hundred lines - but here's one that is chilling in its premonition and beautiful in its diction.
They are carbon monoxide.
Sweetly, sweetly I breathe in,
Filling my veins with invisible, with the million
Probable motes that tick the years off my life.
- A Birthday Present, Sylvia Plath
Frieda Hughes, a masterful poet in her own right, ends this edition with her poem deriding the 2003 film based on Sylvia Plath. It is a beautiful, heartfelt, and wrathful poem based on her hatred of the drudging up of her mother's suicide by the media.
They are killing her again.
She said she did it
One year in every ten,
Now they want to make a film
For anyone lacking the ability
To imagine the body, head in the oven,
Orphaning children. Then
It can be rewound
So they can watch her die
Right from the beginning again.
- My Mother, Frieda Hughes
5/5 beautiful stars.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances
- Ariel, Sylvia Plath
I fell back in love with Sylvia Plath with these fascinatingly complex and morbid poems - but I think I fell in love with Frieda Hughes along the way, with her beautifully composed foreword, eloquent interview, and her singular vitriolic poem at the end of this collection. So I'm going to review them both.
If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
- The Rival, Sylvia Plath
I have over a hundred highlights from this book and a newfound appreciation for poetry anthologies. Each poem by Plath drips raw creativity, passion, and depressive emotion (and savage vitriol towards her adulterous husband, her parents, and society). In the collection, they drill home the beauty of these emotions compounded and referenced across poems, with complex imagery, which constructs a landscape as inventive as any fantasy. Frieda Hughes said it best:
She used every emotional experience as if it were a scrap of material that could be pieced together to make a wonderful dress; she wasted nothing of what she felt, and when in control of those tumultuous feelings she was able to focus and direct her incredible poetic energy to great effect.
Plath's poems are searing indictments of the world, vicious at times, and hold nothing back. They are both autobiographical and masterful scene construction, hiding her message in fiction. At other times, her poems are sinisterly prophetic of her future, of the carbon monoxide that caused her death, the year that she died, and the morbid voyeurism that will follow her story for decades. Of course, her poems include loving praises of her children, nature, and animals, but these often co-exist with darker subtexts in the very next verse. There are truly worlds hidden in this collection, which are a delight to sink into. I can't include all my favorite verses here, because that would be a couple hundred lines - but here's one that is chilling in its premonition and beautiful in its diction.
They are carbon monoxide.
Sweetly, sweetly I breathe in,
Filling my veins with invisible, with the million
Probable motes that tick the years off my life.
- A Birthday Present, Sylvia Plath
Frieda Hughes, a masterful poet in her own right, ends this edition with her poem deriding the 2003 film based on Sylvia Plath. It is a beautiful, heartfelt, and wrathful poem based on her hatred of the drudging up of her mother's suicide by the media.
They are killing her again.
She said she did it
One year in every ten,
Now they want to make a film
For anyone lacking the ability
To imagine the body, head in the oven,
Orphaning children. Then
It can be rewound
So they can watch her die
Right from the beginning again.
- My Mother, Frieda Hughes
5/5 beautiful stars.
April 20, 2020
Sylvia Plath is one of my favourite writers and Ariel one of my favourite collections of poetry.
"Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well".
The poems in this collection are largely dominated by the themes of sadness, suicide and death, which doesn't make for happy reading by any means, but I am always blown away by the sheer power and haunting nature of Plath's words. With poetry being one of the (if not the) most personal forms of expression, we can read the poems in Ariel as a fascinating look inside the mind of Plath. Given that she chose to end her life soon after these poems were written and compiled, we can assume that, devastatingly, feelings of sadness and thoughts of death were in the forefront of her mind at this time, and this certainly comes through in the range of poems.
I am a huge fan of Plath and it would be impossible for me to discuss all of the poems I love in this collection, as I truly do love them all. I find such beauty in her words, even when she is writing about the brutality and sheer horridness of life. There is a deep and profound sadness in the beauty she writes about. I find it to be both fascinating and genius.
Some highlights, for me: the famous "Daddy", "Lady Lazarus", "Elm", "Ariel", "Medusa", "Wintering".
"Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well".
The poems in this collection are largely dominated by the themes of sadness, suicide and death, which doesn't make for happy reading by any means, but I am always blown away by the sheer power and haunting nature of Plath's words. With poetry being one of the (if not the) most personal forms of expression, we can read the poems in Ariel as a fascinating look inside the mind of Plath. Given that she chose to end her life soon after these poems were written and compiled, we can assume that, devastatingly, feelings of sadness and thoughts of death were in the forefront of her mind at this time, and this certainly comes through in the range of poems.
I am a huge fan of Plath and it would be impossible for me to discuss all of the poems I love in this collection, as I truly do love them all. I find such beauty in her words, even when she is writing about the brutality and sheer horridness of life. There is a deep and profound sadness in the beauty she writes about. I find it to be both fascinating and genius.
Some highlights, for me: the famous "Daddy", "Lady Lazarus", "Elm", "Ariel", "Medusa", "Wintering".
December 27, 2023
* a birthday present
* Medusa
* the bee meeting
* Medusa
* the bee meeting
March 29, 2018
Esta ha sido una lectura dolorosa. Llegué al libro empujado por la obra de teatro del Matacandelas, "La chica que quería ser dios", y lo primero que me encontré, en las palabras previas de Frieda Hughes, fue un cansancio infinito expresado con rabia acerca de aquellos que convertían la muerte de su madre en un becerro de oro. Para ella, como lectora de poesía y como hija, la figura de Sylvia Plath es mucho más que el día infausto de la llave de gas.
Así, entonces, presenta Hughes la edición restaurada del Ariel como un libro increíble, sí, pero tristemente empañado por su condición simbólica de testamento artístico. Su madre, nos cuenta, sí era este delirio y esta furia, y sí fue la tristeza que la llevó a salir del mundo; pero era también otras muchas cosas, y es deber del lector tener la inteligencia necesaria para desligar el suicidio de la obra, y permitirse estar abierto para leerla desde sus múltiples matices de humanidad.
Esto, sin embargo, es labor titánica. Leer el Ariel sin pensar en el escritorio sobre el que fue encontrado, en ese segundo piso bajo el cual una mujer sella con trapos las rendijas de las puertas para poder asfixiarse, es difícil. En cierto modo, la decisión de morir ha impregnado estas páginas, cuya oscuridad intrínseca las hace receptores más que adecuados para esa traslación entre vida y obra.
Son estos poemas un despliegue de rabia y dolor, suenan, en muchas ocasiones, como la maldición del condenado a sus verdugos, expresada al tiempo con rencor y carcajada. Versos del tipo:
Contienen toda la tensión de un espíritu dividido entre la entrega y la rebelión, y toma un esfuerzo garrafal intentar olvidar que la autora de "Lady Lazarus" terminó su vida por mano propia en la cocina de su casa:
Sin embargo, consiguiendo o fracasando en la petición de Hughes, los poemas cargan una increíble fuerza dramática. Ya dije que está dividida entre el odio y la carcajada, también podríamos decir que está dividida entre el dolor y el gozo. El primero, impuesto por el mundo. El segundo, surgido de la íntima certeza de poder, al menos durante el instante de la escritura, mandar el mundo al carajo.
Tal es la vocación de la escritura. Esa, podemos decirlo, la sentía Plath en cada nervio.
Así, entonces, presenta Hughes la edición restaurada del Ariel como un libro increíble, sí, pero tristemente empañado por su condición simbólica de testamento artístico. Su madre, nos cuenta, sí era este delirio y esta furia, y sí fue la tristeza que la llevó a salir del mundo; pero era también otras muchas cosas, y es deber del lector tener la inteligencia necesaria para desligar el suicidio de la obra, y permitirse estar abierto para leerla desde sus múltiples matices de humanidad.
Esto, sin embargo, es labor titánica. Leer el Ariel sin pensar en el escritorio sobre el que fue encontrado, en ese segundo piso bajo el cual una mujer sella con trapos las rendijas de las puertas para poder asfixiarse, es difícil. En cierto modo, la decisión de morir ha impregnado estas páginas, cuya oscuridad intrínseca las hace receptores más que adecuados para esa traslación entre vida y obra.
Son estos poemas un despliegue de rabia y dolor, suenan, en muchas ocasiones, como la maldición del condenado a sus verdugos, expresada al tiempo con rencor y carcajada. Versos del tipo:
If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating. (73)
*
Si la luna sonriera, se parecería a ti.
También tu dejas esa impresión
De algo hermoso, pero aniquilador.
Contienen toda la tensión de un espíritu dividido entre la entrega y la rebelión, y toma un esfuerzo garrafal intentar olvidar que la autora de "Lady Lazarus" terminó su vida por mano propia en la cocina de su casa:
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you can say I've a call. (15)
*
Morir
Es un arte, como todo lo demás.
Yo lo hago excepcionalmente bien.
Lo hago de modo que se sienta infernal.
Lo hago de modo que se sienta real.
Supongo podrían decir que tengo vocación.
Sin embargo, consiguiendo o fracasando en la petición de Hughes, los poemas cargan una increíble fuerza dramática. Ya dije que está dividida entre el odio y la carcajada, también podríamos decir que está dividida entre el dolor y el gozo. El primero, impuesto por el mundo. El segundo, surgido de la íntima certeza de poder, al menos durante el instante de la escritura, mandar el mundo al carajo.
Tal es la vocación de la escritura. Esa, podemos decirlo, la sentía Plath en cada nervio.
June 7, 2018
5- I'm so glad I chose to read The Restored Edition of Ariel. I loved the versatility of this collection! There are two copies of each poem; The first contains some annotations via Ted Hughes, the second were reproductions taken directly from Plath's typewritten editions. There is also a lot of extra content, like notes Sylvia made on some of the more well-known poems in Ariel. This made for a very interactive read! I found myself moving backward and forward through the book, reading each poem multiple times, checking for annotations and differences in the texts.
But even beyond the edition of the book, Ariel is an absolutely stunning collection of poems. I am not usually a big fan of poetry, but Plath's work is truly admirable. She is at once macabre, tender, and honest. I'm not saying that I understood all of the content in Ariel by any means, but that is one of the things I loved about it. I'm sure this book is one I will continue to pull down and reread for years to come.
But even beyond the edition of the book, Ariel is an absolutely stunning collection of poems. I am not usually a big fan of poetry, but Plath's work is truly admirable. She is at once macabre, tender, and honest. I'm not saying that I understood all of the content in Ariel by any means, but that is one of the things I loved about it. I'm sure this book is one I will continue to pull down and reread for years to come.
November 19, 2025
*regrets*
i wanted to read poetry and i picked the wrong book for it 🫠
i wanted to read poetry and i picked the wrong book for it 🫠
January 7, 2011
I don't begin to pretend I understood all of these poems, or all of any one of them. But I love them...the sounds, the images. The fierceness often takes my breath away. Her images of the ordinary life of a mother contrasts with the violence, the hooks, the hisses, the shrieks, the worms. More than this, tho, THIS edition has restored Plath's original plan for her collection. Her suicide meant Ted Hughes controlled the editorial decisions for publication and he did not follow her wishes. Another reason this edition is so special is the forward and interviews with Plath's and Hughes's daughter, Frieda. She tells such a different tale about her famous parents than we have spun in our own imaginations. She tells of a loving father who worked to keep the memory of Sylvia fresh in the minds and hearts of her motherless children. Frieda even includes one of her own poems that echoes lines from her mother's work.
Pieces I especially loved:
'Morning Song'
'The Applicant'
'Lady Lazarus'
'Tulips'
'The Jailor'
'Letter in November'
'Wintering'
and the similes in 'You're'
Lines that resonate for me:
“The wind gagging my mouth with my own hair”
“The moon lays a hand on my forehead/Blank-faces and mum as a nurse”
“Dying is an art, like everything else/I do it exceptionally well”
“The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here”
“I am myself. That is not enough”
“…the train shrieks echo like souls on hooks”
“Loveless as the multiplication tables”
“Viciousness in the kitchen/The potatoes hiss”
“The courage of the shut mouth, in spite of artillery.”
“Your wishes/Hiss at my sins.”
“Your dissatisfactions…/arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity”
"Winter is for women."
Pieces I especially loved:
'Morning Song'
'The Applicant'
'Lady Lazarus'
'Tulips'
'The Jailor'
'Letter in November'
'Wintering'
and the similes in 'You're'
Lines that resonate for me:
“The wind gagging my mouth with my own hair”
“The moon lays a hand on my forehead/Blank-faces and mum as a nurse”
“Dying is an art, like everything else/I do it exceptionally well”
“The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here”
“I am myself. That is not enough”
“…the train shrieks echo like souls on hooks”
“Loveless as the multiplication tables”
“Viciousness in the kitchen/The potatoes hiss”
“The courage of the shut mouth, in spite of artillery.”
“Your wishes/Hiss at my sins.”
“Your dissatisfactions…/arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity”
"Winter is for women."
February 25, 2022
I re-read this in tandem with reading Heather Clark's fantastic biography, Red Comet. This is an extraordinary collection - different from what I remember from my first read, likely because I was young and the collection was the Hughes edited version that left out some of her most searing words ("Rabbit Catcher", "The Jailor"). This collection was written in a white heat toward the end of her life after Hughes had left her. Yes, some of it is a big 'ole "fuck you" to Hughes, but that doesn't take away from the genius of the words behind the fuck you. And, apart from those poems, there are those on motherhood, madness, etc. that are brilliant. "Tulips" gutted me.
August 6, 2022
Não sei quantas vezes vou ler e reler os poemas de Ariel e achar que eles são o que há de emocionante produzido durante os últimos anos de 1950. Porque ele diz muito da construção poética desde dos primeiros poemas de adolescente de Sylvia ou mesmo o "among the ruins" que marca o começo do "collected poems". E ele é tão dialógico com o "to bedlam" da sexton que imagino elas se lendo violentamente. Vou ler muitas vezes ainda e dizer que não gosto da tradução que temos hoje hahaha. Se alguém se interessar, leia alguns poemas traduzidos pela Marina Della Vale https://www.revistas.usp.br/clt/artic...
February 28, 2012
Ariel... what we lost when we lost Sylvia Plath. That ferocity. She wrote these poems in a frenzy of creativity, a firestorm of the need to be understood, the need to explicate personal truth, here about the horror of existence--which can be a stronger urge than the urge to live. Ariel is not only the spirit in The Tempest, but a horse who ran away with her. What is that plunging power that is beyond her control? Beautiful, chilling, unarguable.
March 27, 2021
i love plath’s words with all my heart — her singing, deeply hurtful words. some poems aren’t as great as the others and i think they lack concision, they’d rather be spilled all over to create alliterations and a recurring of sounds than be confined in lesser, stronger words. still loved it though (i especially liked “barren woman”, “lady lazarus” and “tulips”), and still adore her
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