From the original review in The Age, Melbourne, Australia, July 10, 1965: Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1932. In 1956, while studying on a Fulbright grant, she met and married the poet Ted Hughes. In 1960 her first book of poems appeared, and in 1963, she committed suicide.

Sylvia Plath – Ariel | Genius Sylvia Plath – Ariel | Genius

I’m just not sure that for the most part, Plath’s words are my kind of words. I’m not a big poem fan, and felt next to no connection with any of the other poems. In particular, I think I struggle with writing that’s far removed from the literal. Metaphors, similes, they all make me glaze over a bit and these poems are rife with them. Many around the subject of dying and death (understandable given Plath’s history).

More about Ariel by Sylvia Plath

See Faber authors in conversation and hear readings from their work at Faber Members events, literary festivals and at book shops across the UK. It has to do with her extraordinary outburst of creative energy in the months before her death, culminating in the last few weeks when, as she herself wrote, she was at work every morning between four and seven, producing two sometimes three poems a day. It starts as simple narrative description; but as “dark” is repeated it is somehow made to reverberate inwardly, crystallizing into a metaphor which voices her underlying sense of threat.

Ariel by Sylvia Plath | Poetry Foundation

I'm wanting to get into more poetry, but I have to classify books of poetry in two categories: poems I understood, and poems I didn't. The majority of these poems went over my head. Reading “Lady Lazarus,” I hear Plath’s saucy voice above the bleating of the herd. If they want to look, let them look. Let them look and gape and drool. The restored edition of Ariel is the group of poems that Sylvia Plath left as a manuscript at the time of her death by suicide in 1963. The originally published Ariel was edited by her former husband, Ted Hughes, who substituted some of her other poems written in the last months of her life. The forward by their daughter, Frieda Hughes, discusses the strengths and weaknesses of each grouping of poems, trying to be fair to each parent. They are difficult, uncertain poems, some extremely obscure and all primarily dependent on central images. Formal rhythm and the logic of rational statement are both dispensed with, the main principle of organization being a free-association technique. The change through which the speaker is going is described in the next stanza. She is changing from “Foam to wheat” and shedding her old self. She is becoming one with the landscape she is flying through; she is,Some exotic birds aren’t meant to be caged. It would be a sin not to allow their colorful feathers to be spread and fly away. Sylvia escaped from a colorless world to soar the skies of eternity, tingeing them with burning bright celestial pathways that enlighten the firmament of those who, from time to time, dare to look up to the floors of heaven and allow themselves to be consumed by the flames of blazing and immortal art.

Ariel by Sylvia Plath - Poem Analysis Ariel by Sylvia Plath - Poem Analysis

Although I didn't grasp most of the poems in this collection, I did really enjoy a few: Sheep in the Fog, Lady Lazarus, Tulips, and The Rival. Marjorie Perloff said in her article, "The Two Ariels: The (Re)making Of The Sylvia Plath Canon” that “The fact remains that Plath herself had arranged the future Ariel poems ‘in a careful sequence,’ plotting out every detail including the first and last words of the volume." [3] Another critic remarked that “her poetry would have been valuable no matter what she had written about.” [3] A very accurate description of Plath, considering her form of poetry was notorious for being dark and questionable among her readers. On January 16, 2004, The Independent newspaper in London published an article that ranked Ariel as the 3rd best book of modern poetry among 'The 10 Best Modern Poetry Books.' The myth, then, is a diversion from the objective achievement. For the very reason that it has an originality that keeps it apart from any poetic fads. Some of her images take on forceful private meanings. Poppies are associated with violence and with the malignant blood cells of hemophilia, the Medusa head with the reality of death, bees with the life of the soul after death.

It is too concentrated and detached and ironic for “confessional” verse, with all that implies of self-indulgent cashing-in on misfortunes; and it is violent without any deliberate exploitation of horrors and petty nastiness. They are charging directly at the sun, a new day is approaching. The speaker can see a new, intense, burning light at the end of her tunnel, and she is heading straight for it. This is where she will find her new life. I got a present. But I was thinking that if I unwrapped it, it would bite my face off. So I didn't. Hah. That menace carries over into the next bit of description (of the noise) and shift, though another image, into wry helplessness (“I am not Caesar”); at which point a sense of proportion reasserts itself: “They can die … I am the am the owner.”