![]() First edition cover | |
Author | Sylvia Plath |
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Genre | Poetry |
Publisher | Faber and Faber |
Publication date | 1965 |
Publication place | United Kingdom |
Pages | 85 (Harper & Row first edition) |
ISBN | 0060908904 |
Ariel is Sylvia Plath's second collection of poetry. It was first released in 1965, two years after her death by suicide. The poems of Ariel, with their free-flowing images and characteristically menacing psychic landscapes, marked a dramatic turn from Plath's earlier Colossus poems. [1]
Ted Hughes, Plath's widower and the editor of Ariel, made substantial changes to her intended plan for the collection by changing her ordering of the poems, dropping some pieces, and adding others. The first American edition was published in 1966 and included an introduction by the poet Robert Lowell. This was appropriate, since, in a BBC interview, Plath had cited Lowell's book Life Studies as having had a profound influence over the poetry she was writing in the last phase of her writing career. [2] In the same interview, Plath also cited the poet Anne Sexton as an important influence on her writing during that time, since Sexton was also exploring some of the same dark, taboo, personal subject matter that Plath was exploring in her writing. [2]
In 2004, a new edition of Ariel was published which for the first time restored the selection and arrangement of the poems as Plath had left them. The 2004 edition also features a foreword by Frieda Hughes, the daughter of Plath and Hughes.
Poems marked with an * were not in Plath's original manuscript, but were added by Ted Hughes. Most of them date from the last few weeks of Plath's life.
Poems marked with an ** were included in Plath's original manuscript, but were removed by Ted Hughes.
American poetry scholar 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] In 2016, The Guardian ranked Ariel as the 16th best nonfiction book of all time. [4]