Ariel
1965
- american poetry
- poetry
- textual criticism
- open_syllabus_project
- poetry (poetic works by one author)
- american literature
- poésie américaine
- general
The story
"A restored edition of Sylvia Plath's collection of poems that were published after her death that restores the selection and arrangement of the poems as Plath left them at the point of her death." Upon the publication of her posthumous volume of poetry, Ariel, in the mid-1960s, Sylvia Plath became a household name. Readers may be surprised to learn that the draft of Ariel left behind by Sylvia Plath when she died in 1963 is different from the volume of poetry eventually published to worldwide acclaim. This facsimile edition restores, for the first time, the selection and arrangement of the poems as Sylvia Plath left them at the point of her death. In addition to the facsimile pages of Sylvia Plath's manuscript, this edition also includes in facsimile the complete working drafts of the title poem, "Ariel," in order to offer a sense of Plath's creative process, as well as notes the author made for the BBC about some of the manuscript's poems. In her insightful foreword to this volume, Frieda Hughes, Sylvia Plath's daughter, explains the reasons for the differences between the previously published edition of Ariel as edited by her father, Ted Hughes, and her mother's original version published here. With this publication, Sylvia Plath's legacy and vision will be re-evaluated in the light of her original working draft.--Book jacket.
What it’s like
Facsimile pages of Plath's typed and handwritten manuscript, with strikeouts, marginal corrections and the drafts of the title poem, give the book the feel of a worktable left mid-session: pale paper, uneven type, ink rewritten over ink. The poems themselves are spare and sharp, built from short lines, stark imagery of bees, ovens, winter and glass, and a lean, controlled voice that can turn savage or tender within a single stanza. The mood is cold and electric, a sense of clarity pressing against despair. It suits a quiet night alone, a slow dip into one poem at a time, or a reader curious about how a collection gets assembled. Pacing is uneven by design, with the drafts and notes slowing the reading and the best-known poems arriving like sudden light. The emotional register is grief, rage and suicidal depression, handled with precision rather than melodrama. Violence is present in imagery and reference, including Holocaust allusions and self-destruction, but there is no gore and little that is graphic, though the content is heavy and can be hard going. It is for readers of confessional poetry and for anyone who wants to see the unfinished shape of a famous book.
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