Product Description

"In these poems...Sylvia Plath becomes herself, becomes something imaginary, newly, wildly and subtly created."
-- From the Introduction by Robert Lowell

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #65059 in Books
• Published on: 1999-03-01
• Released on: 1999-02-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Amazon.com
Sylvia Plath churned out her final poems at the remarkable rate of two or three a day, and Robert Lowell describes them as written by "hardly a person at all ... but one of those super-real, hypnotic, great classical heroines." Even more remarkable, she wrote them during one of the coldest, snowiest winters (1962-63) Londoners have ever known. Snowbound, without central heating, she and her two children spent much of their time sniffling, coughing, or running temperatures (In "Fever 103°" she writes, "I have been flickering, off, on, off on. / The sheets grow heavy as a lecher's kiss."). Pipes froze, lights failed, and candles were unobtainable.

As if these physical privations weren't enough, Plath was out in the cold in another sense--her husband, Ted Hughes, had left her for another woman earlier that year. Despite all this (or perhaps because of it), the Ariel poems dazzle with their lyricism, their surprising and vivid imagery, and their wit. Rather than confining herself to her bleak surroundings, Plath draws from a wide array of experience. In "Berck-Plage," for instance, clouds are "electrifyingly-coloured sherbets, scooped from the freeze." In "The Night Dances," the poet stands crib-side, reveling in her son's own brand of do-si-do: "Such pure leaps and spirals--Surely they travel / The world forever, I shall not entirely / Sit emptied of beauties, the gift / Of your small breath..."

Though at times they present the reader with hopelessness laid bare, these poems also teem with the brightest shards of a life, confounding those who merely look for the words of a gloomy, dispassionate suicide. Plath rose each morning in the final months of her life to "that still blue, almost eternal hour before the baby's cry" and left us these words like "axes/After whose stroke the wood rings..."

From Publishers Weekly
Along with withholding (or allegedly destroying) one of Plath’s journals after her death in 1963, Plath’s husband, the late English poet laureate Ted Hughes, brought out a version of her second and final book of poems, Ariel, that differed from the manuscript she left on her desk. That edition—for which Hughes dropped 12 poems, added 12 composed a few months later, shifted the poems’ ordering and included an introduction by Robert Lowell—has become a classic. The present edition restores the 12 missing poems, drops the 12 added ones, and prints the manuscript in Plath’s own order, followed by a facsimile of the typescript Plath left, along with a foreword by Plath and Hughes’s daughter Frieda Hughes (Wooroloo), several hand- and typewritten drafts of the book’s title poem and notes by David Semanki. The original manuscript’s contents have been widely known since Hughes published them in the 1981 Collected Poems, but there is an undeniable thrill to reading Plath’s book as she left it—the lacerating "The Rabbit Catcher," left out of the Ted Hughes edition, comes third here, with its rhyme of "force" with "gorse," the flowers of which "had an efficiency, a great beauty,/ And were extravagant, like torture." As to whether this version is a better book, only time will tell. For now, despite Frieda Hughes’s repeated references to her father’s respect for Plath’s work, tally another shot in the Plath wars.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Plath and her indelible writings have been subjected to a veritable hurricane of commentary. The storm seems to be subsiding, and although it does leave devastation in its wake--the unfair vilification of poet Ted Hughes, Plath's husband, the father of their two children and the holder of the copyright to Plath's writing--it has also kept Plath's work in the public eye, and it has inspired the publication of this treasure: the original manuscript for Plath's masterpiece, Ariel. As Frieda Hughes, a poet and an artist, explains in her set-the-record-straight foreword, her mother left behind a manuscript of 40 poems ordered by a table of contents as well as around 30 more poems written in what Frieda calls the "Ariel voice." When Ted Hughes published Ariel, he replaced and rearranged poems, editorial decisions that have been harshly criticized. Now, finally, readers can see Plath's actual manuscript in this handsome facsimile, which provides a missing piece in the Plath annals and proves that there's nothing like going to the source. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

harrowingly alive, forcefully galloping, life-affirming poems
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."

A 'Just Right' edition.
I'm not going to review Ariel.
If you've come this far, you've already read the poems, either on-line, or in a paperback edition. There is nothing I could say about one of the greatest poetic works of the 20th century.
I will review this edition, however. It's just right. Not to fancy (Ariel somehow wouldn't work in a gilded leather bound edition), certainly not cheap. It's well bound, well put together, and the original manuscript works are here, in an easy to read format.
It's over twenty bucks, and that's a lot of money for such a small book--but you'll keep it forever.

Totally Awesome a must have
So dark yet beautiful, a must have for every women. I was left speechless with it's intensity and shocked by the passion.
I ordered Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters, at the same time and read it after reading Ariel. Then I started reading them together one of his and then one of hers. I was moved to tears and spent an evening in near exhaustation, I'm left speechless.
Call me silly, but I can't help but see a very tragic modern day Romeo and Juliet with these two books. The expression of pain, hurt and love in these two poets is beyond comparsion and seldom seen. They touched the soul and will be remembered.
Thank you Sylvia and Thank you Ted.