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    Ariel: The Restored Edition
    Ariel: The Restored Edition
    Ariel: The Restored Edition
    Ebook264 pages1 hour

    Ariel: The Restored Edition

    By Sylvia Plath

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    “Made up of poems that are so original in their style and so startlingly accomplished in their confessional voice that they helped change the direction of contemporary poetry, Ariel is a masterpiece.”  — New York Observer

    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    When Sylvia Plath died, she not only left behind a prolific life but also her unpublished literary masterpiece, Ariel.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 the public, it garnered worldwide acclaim, but 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 alter her legacy forever.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateNov 15, 2016
    ISBN9780062669445
    Ariel: The Restored Edition
    Author

    Sylvia Plath

    Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Massachusetts. Her books include the poetry collections The Colossus, Crossing the Water, Winter Trees, Ariel, and Collected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize. A complete and uncut facsimile edition of Ariel was published in 2004 with her original selection and arrangement of poems. She was married to the poet Ted Hughes, with whom she had a daughter, Frieda, and a son, Nicholas. She died in London in 1963.

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    Reviews for Ariel

    4/5

    796 ratings25 reviews

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    • 5/5
      The short length of the book and seeming simplicity - a woman rides her horse through the countryside - is belied by the incredible amount of attention given to it. For it explores far more than a simple daybreak ride. The use of dazzling imagery, vivid emotional resonance, historical and biblical allusions, and a breathtaking sense of movement, explores several different subjects, including - poetic creativity; sexuality; animism; suicide and death; self-realization and self-transformation; and mysticism.
      If one is so inclined, one can even connect this interpretation to the feminist and creative interpretations to suggest that Plath's ultimate goal was to relate ecstatic frenzy - how we identify and understand the frenzy ultimately reveals our own personality and interest.

      Sylvia PsychoPlath—Interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college girl mentality.
    • 5/5
      Ariel
      By Sylvia Plath
      1965/66

      This spirited and intelligent woman has one of the most amazing minds and a clever wit in confessional poetry ever. Ariel, a collection of her poems, centers of her dark and desperate attempts to overcome her mental state. The love/hate relationship with her father is told in one of the centerpieces of this collection. Title "Daddy", it sets the pace and mindset for her anxiety and darkness, eventually leading to her suicide.
      This is a very personal and dramatic collection, that illustrates her intensity as a women, a woman writer, and her conflicted mental state. Essential reading.
    • 5/5
      Sylvia Plath wrote with such raw energy and emotion. Her essence is on every page, in every word. Nowhere is that more plain to see than in the collected poems in Ariel. As the last collection of poetry written before her death it is riddled with references to death. That is to be expected from one suffering from depression, on the wrong kind of medicine, and already an attempted suicide survivor. It's as if death is stalking her, wooing her (case in point: the last line of "Death & Co" is "somebody is done for" (p 36) and "Dying is an art...I do it exceptionally well" (p 15).
    • 3/5
      Is there any book more irritating? It just gets right down under your skin like someone sharpened a bitterness stick and just wants to poke you with it over and over. (I think someone did.) Sometimes I wake up in the morning and the first thing I think is, "You do not do, you do not do any more black shoe." and then the second thing I think is, "Fuck you, Sylvia Plath."
    • 5/5
      I love Sylvia Plath's long, thin poems. Although often dark, death-obsessed and sometimes nasty, I love the way she makes the ordinary feel quite extraordinary with her great artistic way with words. Although many of the poems seem very strange, if you know anything of Sylvia Plath's life, they can also be seen as quite autobiographical. Her preoccupation with her lost father can be seen in Daddy and in her bee-keeping poems. Her suicide attempts are explored in poems like Edge and Lady Lazurus. Marriage is examined in The Applicant and motherhood is in poems like You're and Morning Song. I studied Sylvia Plath as a teenager and still find enjoyment and further discoveries when reading Ariel.
    • 5/5
      This woman's mad mind enthralls me. If asked to do a reading of her work, I wold always incdlude "Daddy," "Balloons," and "Cut.".There are few mad geniuses (geni?) and i have been in love with her prose since the 1960s.
    • 5/5
      Come on, if you are a teenager suffering from any form of angst, this belongs on your bookshelf right next to Catcher. If you are a college student it probably already is there if you want to write. She is probably given a little more literary recognition than she is actually due, due to her young, unfortunate and untimely death, but she still can write circles around you bub.
    • 5/5
      Ariel is a great collection of Plath's poetry. Her genuis and talent definitely shows through here. I recommend Tulips, Cut, Daddy, and pretty much every other poem in here. This is a book to be treasured and loved, my copy certainly is.
    • 3/5
      Favorites: Morning Song, The Applicant, Lady Lazarus, Tulips, The Arrival of the Bee Box, Edge.
    • 4/5
      It is difficult to read Sylvia Plath, one of the finest poets of the 20th century, without the knowledge and half-knowledge of her life and death intruding and cementing meaning on to her work. This, her second collection, published posthumously in 1965, contains some of her most fabulously versatile and energetic verse despite her preoccupation with death which is often as theatrical as it is agonising. The volume begins as she wanted with "Morning Song", a colourful, rich poem to her baby: "Love set you going like a fat gold watch". In it, she sees herself as "cow-heavy and floral in my Victorian nightgown", contrasting beautifully with the child's mouth which "opens clean as a cat's". She need not mention milk. The "clear vowels" of the baby's cries "rise like balloons", re-emphasising the lightness and playful joy she could experience through motherhood. "Night Dances", about the "pure leaps and spirals" her son performed in bed before laying down, comfort her. "Surely they travel / The world forever, I shall not entirely / Sit emptied of beauties, the gift / Of your small breath, the drenched grass / Smell of your sleep, lilies, lilies." The risky, running images and associations are breathtaking, still. There is something redemptive in her love for her child which eases her anguish. "The blood blooms clean / In you, ruby. / The pain / you wake to is not yours ... You are the one / Solid the spaces lean on, envious." Her infamous poems "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy" are also here. In both, the first person narrator is a persona, a fiction that overlaps with autobiography. Plath once explained that "Lady Lazarus" is "a woman who has the great and terrible gift of being reborn. The only trouble is, she has to die first." Deeply sardonic in tone, she has the levity of Dorothy Parker in moments. "Dying is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well." But there is resurgence after melt-down: "Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air." Anger with her father, characterised as a Nazi, Herr Enemy extends in "Daddy". "Daddy, I have had to kill you. / You died before I had time-- / Marble-heavy, a bag full of God." It remains a staggering and disturbing poem in which she imagines herself the daughter of a Nazi and a Jew. Plath would have preferred to end the collection with "Wintering", a less contorted poem about storing honey from her beehive. It ends hopefully: "The bees are flying. They taste the spring." Often puzzling or plainly obtuse, Plath's all the better for that. --Cherry Smyth -- Quelle: Amazon.com
    • 4/5
      There are poems here which have such heart, and such depth, that they could be read and reread countless times without ever becoming fully known or tiresome. There are others, at the same time, that pale in comparison, and leave you wanting to return to the poem of a few pages before rather than wonder why the current poem has been included. Thus, the reading experience is unpredictable, at times exhilerating and at other times simply frustrating. Through all of the poems, however, Plath's clear voice and fascinating way with language hold the collection together, and make the read well worth the time. There's no doubt that moving through this collection takes concentration and time, but in the end, the images and emotion behind Plath's work both deserve and reward the attention given. Recommended for any poetry lovers.
    • 5/5
      This volume was probably my first introduction to adult poetry (that is, poetry not written for kids) when I was in college. I was swept under Plath's spell immediately. Her gift of language is riveting. The fact that her life was cut short by her own hand leaves with many feelings; one of them is that, had she chosen to live, she would have gone on to find freedom and support in what was then the nascent women's liberation movement. But that's not how it worked out, to the great loss of not only her family, but to the culture as well.
    • 4/5
      Beautiful and dangerous poems from a very damaged, tormented woman. Each one can cut through you like a shard of shattered glass. Her words are chosen intentionally with multiple layers of meaning. I imagine that this is what reading someone's pain feels like.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed reading your book. I read enthusiastically and understood the story. If you have some great stories like this one, you can publish it on Novel star, just submit your story to hardy@novelstar.top or joye@novelstar.top
    • 5/5
      It's not the agresiveness
      in the choice of her words,
      or the sincerity in the tone of her prose
      that makes you continue flipping the pages It's the unearthly, bold, and butal interpretation of reality that fit's in between the dark crevices of her prose.
    • 4/5
      More lyrical and surreal than her earlier work. The poems aren't defined by topic or tone and tend to bleed into each other - particularly the longer poems - and I would say this detracts from the collection as a whole.
    • 3/5
      Suicidally depressing; daddy issues; obsession with bees and honey. I bought this book as a poetry impulse and on a recommendation of an interesting author. The poetry is alright; it’s the author who is truly interesting.
    • 5/5
      "Ariel," a volume of poems composed mostly before Plath decided to end her own ecstatically troubled life, is an offering that teems with the playfulness of language, bitter cynicism, and ultimately refigures mundane experience into a near-religious profundity.Perhaps this is the aim is all poetry - to reorient the way that we see things, the way that we absorb and incorporate experience. But even the cliché can do this. But none of Plath's poems in this book, not even the worst among them, are that. In "Getting There," the motion of the train is seen as an infinite edacity: "What do wheels eat, these wheels / Fixed to their arcs like gods, / The silver leash of the will - / Inexorable." Later in the poem, we learn that the train is carrying the body of a dead woman and her funeral procession. But this death - "I shall bury the wounded like pupas" - is really nothing but a transmogrifying rebirth. "And I, stepping from this skin / Of old bandages, boredoms, old faces / Step to you from the black car of Lethe, / Pure as a baby.""Daddy," the poem with which most readers will be familiar even if they have not read the rest of the poems, begins as a threnody in memory of her father, but grows into a caustic, brooding indictment utilizing the extended poetic conceit of the Holocaust. In this poem, Plato deals with the betrayal of her father by constructing her poem around the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy. It also references "The vampire who said he was you / And drank my blood for a year, / Seven years, if you want to know" in a none-too-ambiguous reference to her relationship with her husband, fellow poet Ted Hughes.As with many other poems in "Ariel," the effect of poetry that is so troubled and biographical - so confessional - is nothing less than revelatory, hieratic in its insistence that we should rethink ideas of violence and love.
    • 4/5
      Ariel is the collection of poems written in the final months of Plath’s life, as selected and published posthumously by her estranged husband, Ted Hughes. They are of course somber, but have the honesty important for any type of writing, and are executed with skill. There is a starkness and a pervasive sense of isolation here, and while Plath describes the world around her so well, it’s with detachment and there is a sense that she already has one foot out the door. Many have stared down into the same abyss at varying distances from the edge, and while reading these poems I couldn’t help but feel what a shame this is. Perhaps the depth of feeling and depression are inseparable from Plath and part of what made her great, but it doesn’t make it any less a tragedy. There are hints of feminism, as in “The Applicant” where she describes the view of a wife, provided she is “our sort of person”: “A living doll, everywhere you look. / It can sew, it can cook, / It can talk, talk, talk.” And in “Lesbos”, to a girlfriend she has other thoughts about, while “doped and thick from my last sleeping pill”, filled with hatred of marital life with an “impotent husband”: “I should wear tiger pants, I should have an affair. / We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, / Me and you.” But then later, sadly: “I say I may be back. / You know what lies are for. / Even in your Zen heaven we shan’t meet.”Plath speaks through her poems and yet one feels hopelessness and frustration, and the idea that she feels like this line from “The Munich Mannequins”: “Voicelessness. The snow has no voice.” She has not lived up to her own high expectations or society’s; from “Sheep in Fog”: “The hills step off into whiteness. / People or stars / Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.”The denial of one’s attachment to the world is a recurring theme, starting with “Morning Song”, this about her own babies: “I’m no more your mother / Than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow / Effacement at the wind’s hand.” It continues on when she’s part of a group in “The Bee Meeting”, and yet so removed, an isolated observer, starting with a question “Who are these people….”, and ending with another, “why am I cold?” Later in “Paralytic” she writes of her wants and desires gone from the perspective of a paralytic in an iron lung. Everywhere it’s stepping back, stepping back, floating upwards, drifting away. This ain’t cheery stuff, folks. What was a bit shocking was her “seeing herself” as a concentration camp victim more than once, the ultimate dehumanization, including in the poem “Daddy”, which sears on the page and ends with this line: “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.” Plath’s father died when she was eight and she never got over it, and apparently pours out her anger here not for having been abused in some way, but for the simple fact that he died and left her. I won’t excerpt that one in its entirety, but it’s the poem I would recommend starting with.Quotes:On action, from “Years”:“O God, I am not like youIn your vacuous black,Stars stuck all over, bright stupid confetti.Eternity bores me,I never wanted it.What I love isThe piston in motion – My soul dies before it.And the hooves of the horses, Their merciless churn.”On love, from “Elm”:“Clouds pass and disperse.Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?Is it for such I agitate my heart?”On purity and fragility, from “Fever 103”:“I am too pure for you or anyone.Your bodyHurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern – My head a moon,Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skinInfinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.”
    • 2/5
      I have been trying to read more poetry of late, but I think this collection is just a bit too unintelligible for me. Sometimes beautiful, but most often they make no sense. I guess I like to know what a poem is about, rather than a just collection of beautiful words and rhythms.
    • 4/5
      The Bell Jar will always be my favorite Plath. But this poetry collection is provocative, angry, and beautifully written, well worth the read.
    • 3/5
      Ariel, the collection of poems I read this week, was a book I found at Half-Priced Books, along with some other works by Plath. I have been interested in Sylvia Plath's novel and writings since I was in high school. I was a little afraid that I might have tended towards The Bell Jar in high school because it just SPOKE to me, and that I would be disappointed in this collection. I sincerely hope that is not the case, because I plan to re-read The Bell Jar this year as an adult, but I must admit, I wasn't impressed with Ariel. Some of the poems were wonderful, but most of them weren't my style. On the other hand, you can tell that Plath was severely depressed as she wrote them, and they certainly broke my heart that such a bright mind could succumb to such a dark place. It truly can effect anyone, and Plath was no exception.
    • 5/5
      For a long time I wrote off Plath as an angsty suicide, but that's doing her a great disservice. These are remarkable poems. Forget, for a moment, that she killed herself soon after. Read the poems, absorb them -- and THEN remember.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I read this book in the summer of 1997 when everything in my life was up in the air and I wasn't sleeping more than an hour or two a night and I wasn't eating and all I was doing was reading. And I had my wisdom teeth removed that summer. Creepy creepy.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      Another piece of literature ruined by high school AP English class and a requirement to write a paper. At 17 I was overwhelmed by Plath, by 19 I was cynical and dismissive, by 22 full of contempt. Maybe I can give it a second chance one day, but it seems like a lot of effort.

    Book preview

    Ariel - Sylvia Plath

    The cover of a book.

    Ariel

    THE RESTORED EDITION

    A Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript,

    Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement

    Sylvia Plath

    Foreword by Frieda Hughes

    A photo shows the paperback imprint of the publishing house HarperCollins Publishers, Harper Perennial, with its logo of an oval with a white circle on it. The names of the cities, New York, London, Toronto, and Sydney are shown below it to represent the locations of its registered offices.

    Dedication

    For

    FRIEDA and NICHOLAS

    Contents

    Cover

    Title Page

    Dedication

    Foreword by Frieda Hughes

    I. Ariel and other poems

    Morning Song

    The Couriers

    The Rabbit Catcher

    Thalidomide

    The Applicant

    Barren Woman

    Lady Lazarus

    Tulips

    A Secret

    The Jailor

    Cut

    Elm

    The Night Dances

    The Detective

    Ariel

    Death & Co.

    Magi

    Lesbos

    The Other

    Stopped Dead

    Poppies in October

    The Courage of Shutting-Up

    Nick and the Candlestick

    Berck-Plage

    Gulliver

    Getting There

    Medusa

    Purdah

    The Moon and the Yew Tree

    A Birthday Present

    Letter in November

    Amnesiac

    The Rival

    Daddy

    You’re

    Fever 103°

    The Bee Meeting

    The Arrival of the Bee Box

    Stings

    Wintering

    II. Facsimile of the manuscript for Ariel and other poems

    III. Facsimile drafts of the poem Ariel

    Appendix I. The Swarm

    Facsimile draft of the poem The Swarm

    Appendix II. Script for the BBC broadcast New Poems by Sylvia Plath

    Notes. by David Semanki

    P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*

    About the Author

    About the Book

    Read On

    Praise

    Also by Sylvia Plath

    Copyright

    About the Publisher

    Foreword

    This edition of Ariel by my mother, Sylvia Plath, exactly follows the arrangement of her last manuscript as she left it. As her daughter I can only approach it, and its divergence from the first United Kingdom publication of Ariel in 1965 and subsequent United States publication in 1966, both edited by my father, Ted Hughes, from the purely personal perspective of its history within my family.

    When she committed suicide on February 11, 1963, my mother left a black spring binder on her desk, containing a manuscript of forty poems. She probably last worked on the manuscript’s arrangement in mid-November 1962. Death & Co., written on the fourteenth of that month is the last poem to be included in her list of contents. She wrote an additional nineteen poems before her death, six of which she finished before our move to London from Devon on December 12, and a further thirteen in the last eight weeks of her life. These poems were left on her desk with the manuscript.

    The first cleanly typed page of the manuscript gives the title of the collection as Ariel and other poems. On the two sheets that follow, alternative titles had been tried out, each title scored out in turn and a replacement handwritten above it. On one sheet the title was altered from The Rival to A Birthday Present to Daddy. On the other, the title changed from The Rival to The Rabbit Catcher to A Birthday Present to Daddy. These new title poems are in chronological order (July 1961, May 1962, September 1962, and October 1962) and give an idea of earlier possible dates of her rearrangement of the working manuscript.

    When Ariel was first published, edited by my father, it was a somewhat different collection from the manuscript my mother left behind. My father had roughly followed the order of my mother’s contents list, taking twelve poems out of the U.S. publication, and thirteen out of the U.K. publication. He replaced these with ten selected for the U.K. edition, and twelve selected for the U.S. edition. These he chose from the nineteen very late poems written after mid-November 1962, and three earlier poems.

    There was no lack of choice. Since the publication of The Colossus in 1960, my mother had written many poems that showed an advance on her earlier work. These were transitional poems between the very different styles of The Colossus and Ariel (a selection of them was published in Crossing the Water in 1971). But toward the end of 1961, poems in the Ariel voice began to appear here and there among the transitional poems. They had an urgency, freedom, and force that was quite new in her work. In October 1961, there was The Moon and the Yew Tree and Little Fugue; An Appearance followed in April 1962. From this point, all the poems she wrote were in the distinctive Ariel voice. They are poems of an otherworldly, menacing landscape:

    This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.

    The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.

    The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God,

    . . .

    I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

    (The Moon and the Yew Tree)

    Then, still in early April 1962, she wrote Among the Narcissi and Pheasant, moments of perfect poetic poise, tranquil and melancholy—the calm before the storm:

    You said you would kill it this morning.

    Do not kill it. It startles me still,

    The jut of the odd, dark head, pacing

    Through the uncut grass on the elm’s hill.

    (Pheasant)

    After that, the poems came with increasing frequency, ease, and ferocity, culminating in October 1962 when she wrote twenty-five major poems. Her very last poems were written six days before she died. In all, she left around seventy poems in the unique Ariel voice.

    On work-connected visits to London in June 1962, my father began an affair with a woman who had incurred my mother’s jealousy a month earlier. My mother, somehow learning of the affair, was enraged. In July her mother, Aurelia, came to stay at Court Green, our thatched black and white cob house in Devon, for a long visit. Tensions increased between my parents, my mother proposing separation, though they traveled to Galway together that September to find a house where my mother could stay for the winter. By early October, with encouragement from Aurelia (whose efforts I witnessed as a small child), my mother ordered my father out of the house.

    My father went up to London where he first stayed with friends, and then around Christmas rented a flat in Soho. He told me many years later that, despite her apparent determination, he thought my mother might reconsider. We were working towards it when she died, he said.

    Deciding against the house in Galway, my mother moved my brother and me to London in December 1962, to the flat she had rented in what was once Yeats’s house in Fitzroy Road. Until her death, my father visited us there almost daily, often babysitting when my mother needed time for herself.

    Although my mother was in London for eight weeks before she died, my father had left her with their house in Devon, the joint bank account, the black Morris Traveller (their car), and was giving her money to support us. When my mother died, my father had insufficient funds to cover the funeral, and my grandfather, William Hughes, paid for it.

    My father eventually returned to Devon with my brother and me in September 1963, when his sister, Olwyn, came over from Paris to help take care of us. She stayed with us for two years. My father continued to see the other woman on visits to London, but she remained living primarily with her husband for two and a half years after my mother’s death.

    Throughout their time together my mother had shown her poems to my father as she wrote them. But after May 1962, when their serious differences began, she kept the poems to herself. My father read Event in

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