Ariel was the second book of Sylvia Plath's poetry to be published. It was originally published in 1965, two years after her death by suicide. In Ariel, the beauty of craft remains even as it reveals the fissures growing in the poet’s psyche. According to the Penguin Companion to American Literature: Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1932. When Plath was only eight years old, her father, who had been strict and authoritarian in his parenting style, died. His death would become the driving force behind a number of her most famous poems, most notably “ Daddy.” Plath graduated summa cum laude from Smith College in 1955. This is the same year in which “Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea” was published. She had battled with depression throughout her schooling, attempting suicide in 1953. It probably won't be right to draw comparisons between the Sylvia Plath who wrote Mad Girl's Love Song during her time at Smith's and the Sylvia Plath of Ariel. There's a world of difference between a Sylvia merely mourning lost love and a bitter, lonesome, vengeful, depressed Sylvia trying to live out the last vestiges of a tumultuous life by seeking a form of catharsis through these poems. And, indeed, a very personal set of poems these are.

Ariel by Sylvia Plath | Waterstones

Merely trying to imagine the ways, in which this lady could have further overwhelmed the literary world had she lived a full life, gives me goosebumps. Many of the poems are more difficult than that, rawer, more extreme. But all have that combination of exploratory invention, violent, threatened personal involvement and a quizzical edge of detachment. The poems are casual yet concentrated, slangy yet utterly unexpected. The poem comprises ten stanzas of three lines each, known as tercets, and a final single line conclusion. Ariel is the name of the spirit in Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest. Ariel’s story is significant in terms of his imprisonment by Prospero and subsequent release, and his supernatural abilities and insights. These factors are important when interpreting the poem. Ariel is only a selection from a mass of work Plath left. Some of the other pomes have been printed here and there, some have been recorded, some exist only in manuscript. It is to be hoped that all this remaining verse will soon be published. As it is, this book is a major literary event.

Of course then there's Daddy, Elm, Ariel, A birthday present, Letter in November which I love. Some are bitter some are less dark. I have read those poems so many times and I still can't get enough. I fear that I cannot be objective when I am writing (or talking) about Sylvia Plath because she speaks directly to my heart. I can relate to her poems, I can feel them. While it is legitimate to interpret Sylvia Plath’s poetry autobiographically, it can limit understanding. Her poetry also stands alone. One can read into Ariel possible references to women’s entrapment, motherhood, her failed marriage to Ted Hughes and her suicide. But the poem also has universal themes beyond the poet’s own life.

Ariel (Faber Heritage Poetry Editions) by Sylvia Plath Ariel (Faber Heritage Poetry Editions) by Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath has been, and probably always will be, a poet whom words hits me harder than many others’ ever will. Many of the poems in this collection are very familiar to me: I’ve shed tears over them, adored them, resented them, analyzed them to death and absorbed their every message in my heart over the course of years now. However, this was my first time reading this collection as a whole, as opposed to fragmented pieces over time. From the original review in The Observer, March 14, 1965, written by A. Alvarez: It is over two years now since Sylvia Plath died at the age of thirty, and in that time a myth has been gathering around her work. The last works were something quite new in poetry. I wrote at the time in The Observer that Plath was “systematically probing that narrow, violent areas between the viable and the impossible, between experience which can be transmuted into poetry and that which is overwhelming.” She will exhume the past, but before she does she would like to talk price. There is a charge, after all. It is betrayal that hurts the most, not the scrutiny of the multitude. Looking out into the audience, there is only a sea of interchangeable faces. They are of no consequence. It is the betrayal of a loved and trusted one that crushes. To believe in one, to have faith in one—just one, is to risk all.

A 1965 review of Ariel by Sylvia Plath

I went out with this guy once and then I found out he liked to catch rabbits. So he was toast. I should have dimed the bastard. In “The Moon and the Yew Tree” Sylvia Plath presents, not a vision of the picturesque English churchyard outside her bedroom window, but a mental landscape with more melancholy, more solemnity, more Gothic gloom than any representation of physical reality could ever have.

Ariel by Sylvia Plath | The British Library

Also, you can listen Sylvia Plath reading it here There are also other poems she reads from the collection of Ariel, look it up if you haven't already. Nevertheless, her own work affirms the abiding value of literary creation, for poet and reader alike. It is no mean feat to have recorded an enduring attitude to death that embraces a sense of life in the face of suffering and weakness. Sylvia Plath is raw, brutal and bitter. That's a fact I suppose, right? But you see even in her darkest poem (for me) Lady Lazarus she manages to end the poem with an inspiring, uplifting way. The poems in the 1965 edition of Ariel, with their free flowing images and characteristically menacing psychic landscapes, marked a dramatic turn from Plath's earlier Colossus poems. Better to put it on display herself, hang a sign, charge admission. Better to hold her head high and thrust out her chest, work the crowd, be barker and freak in one, expose her scars to all and sundry. And why stop there? Let them come a little closer and smell the smell of death that still clings to her garments. It is good to remember that it is they who are terrified.

It is controlled, serious verse but her later work shows new strains and pressures at work and becomes a poetry of anguished confession.” I got a present. But I was thinking that if I unwrapped it, it would bite my face off. So I didn't. Hah. All of these last verses were intensely personal, nearly all were about dying. So when her death finally came it was prepared for and, in some degree, understood. Look, let's get this straight. I am a tree, you are a woman. We can never be together, not in the way you'd like, anyway. Plus, you're kind of irritating.