Ariel Hardcover – January 1, 1999

I am looking forward to seeing Plath's active work on her poems after just having read her biography, Red Comet and her only novel, The Bell Jar.

I find Sylvia Plath's poetry fascinating. She uses interesting word choices. Her poetry is raw and emotional. I want to reread these poems.

This collection, and Plath in general I think, get both unfairly burdened and paradoxically minimized.So many readers want Plath to mean and to be so many things. Ultimately, this hagiography leads to diminishing the depth of her art to a patina of idiot wind like "feminist," "confessional," and "obsessed with her Daddy/Elektra stuff."All of which has unfortunately kept me away from deeply reading Plath for so long. Interestingly, I came to re-read this collection (or really, in my mind, to read it now for the first time) only because I was reading and LOVING the collected poems of Ted Hughes. He was simply blowing my mind---so I read a bit about him, and though I knew he was married to Plath and a bit about the soap operatic story of his second wife, I never appreciated how much HE, this awe inspiring genius poet stood in total awe of Plath's work. If he was that impressed, I had to see what the fuss was about.And underneath all the expectations and labels, what it's about is DAMN good poetry. The collection starts off with "Morning Song," which is the most accurate, beautiful, sad, and perfect poem I've ever read about caring for children and caring for yourself when you're caring for children. The phrase I used when describing some of the lines to my wife was "inevitable." That's the highest compliment one poet can give another---it means that she didn't get CLOSE to the "truth" of what she was trying to say...she didn't "turn a clever phrase" or tell the truth "slant." She wrote PERFECT words and lines. They HAVE TO be that way. She said it the best it can be said. Done.Luckily for artists after her, she didn't do this ALL the time (who could?) While MANY of the poems in Ariel are inevitable, some miss. Some still hold on to Plath's earlier style in Colossus wherein she attacks the Thesaurus and pursues a sense of ambiguity to the point of producing coldness and vague, limpid lines.But do not be put off by these cautions or by any possible cliche or negative expectations---Plath was an intensely gifted and cosmically touched poet---Ariel roars.

Basically, everybody should read this. I don't care if you don't like poetry.I paid a buck fifty for the paperback "Revised" edition (arranged by Plath's daughter Frieda in an attempt to be more faithful to her mother's arrangement, in contrast to the arrangement by Frieda's father, Ted Hughes), but this is a million dollar book.The poetry is rich in images, with ominous visions of Nazis and death sharing the pages with bees, puking babies, and other fixtures of domesticity. Plath is playful with language, but sharp and relentless in her deconstruction of the world around her. She does not give any illusion of her life as a mother and wife being a fairy tale ending; she readily admits that suicide is on her mind. So thickly layered are each of her poems, I will gladly reread them all a dozen more times to find more juicy double meanings and commentary tucked away in the lines.Some of my personal favorite poems were:Lesbos -- The kitchen is not a holy ground to Sylvia. She enjoys zero time spent with another woman, possibly the mistress who took her husband away, whose grating attitude makes idle chit-chat a living hell.The Applicant -- "First, are you our sort of person?//Do you wear//A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,//A brace or a Hook,//Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch" This poem speaks for itself.Daddy -- Among the most well-known poems from this collection, it devilishly mixes childlike word play with black images of fascism, "The boot in the face, the brute//Brute heart of a brute like you". It reads like a scathing, adult version of Dr. Seuss. I love it.Just get it already!

I love Sylvia Plath. Her poetry is like no other. I love the imagery and expressions. I can feel her sadness, ambiguities, resentments, and the emotional pain she experienced in such a short life. Highly recommended for anyone unfamiliar with this all-star.

Now at long last, we get the "Ariel" we deserve. Plath's admirers have been waiting a long time, since at least the early 1980s when Ted Hughes first revealed that he had changed the order of the poems in his wife's final manuscript. He had added some poems--the final, freezingly depressing ones--and then re-arranaged the bulk of the book to leave an impression of a woman gone over the brink into a chilling fugue state. Now Frieda Hughes, Plath's daughter, 2 when her mother killed herself, has performed a ritual act of atonement to her mother's memory, and given us the original, "happy" (relatively speaking) ARIEL which we have never been able to see.At $24,95, the book's a little expensive, but it feels as though money had been spent on its planning and execution, so you don't feel rooked. In one section, the gray paper on which the facsimile materials are printed is easy on the eyes, aiding the eye as it struggles with Plath's numerous emendations. We get the notes Plath wrote for her own use when she had to do that reading at the BBC towards the end, the more-British-than-thou reading we have grown to love and hate at the same time. Frieda Hughes contributes an interesting and contextualizing introduction in which she seeks to reconcile the differing viewpoints of her mother and father--a challenging task, but she's up to it. The book ends up with four of the bee-keeping poems--and another in the appendix, "The Swarm," which Sylvia kept changing her mind about including. Should she leave it in? Take it out? The title is in brackets. Thus the book ends with a hopeful note, with the freshness of Devon instead of the bleak London winter. It ends, pleasantly enough, with the words, "They taste the spring."

This review refers to the Faber Modern Classics edition, 2015. ISBN 978 0571322725.The quote printed above, supposedly from an introduction by Frieda Hughes, is in fact a blurb on the back cover. There is no introduction whatsoever to this edition, from Hughes or anyone else, as was pointed out by Mr Bennett in his review of 25 September, 2018.I had naively presumed that since Mr Bennett's complaint was more than a year old, it referred to a different edition. It doesn't. The fact that Amazon continues to publish false information more than a year later only serves to emphasize their lack of care and attention.The poems of Sylvia Plath are beyond any 1-to-5 star assessment. This Faber edition is perfectly adequate and good value for the money.The one star rating is solely for this Amazon page.

The poems are obviously amazing, of that there can be no doubt. But this listing mistakenly leads the buyer into believing that the edition contains an introduction by her daughter Frieda, but there is no intro by her, or anyone for that matter. Also, the arrangement of the poems is the same as Ted Hughes's original publication, not the revised order as published elsewhere WITH an intro from her daughter, something that could be an issue for many Plath fans.

Plath is one of my favourite poets. I have idolised her and her work since I was a teenager. Excuse me with I have a fan-girl moment. Plath made me want to write poetry.Ariel, her last hurrah is an amazing collection of poetry. It contains some of her best work and some of my favourite pieces.I love how diverse the poems are in Ariel, the perfect blend of light and dark. The poems are rich in detail, vivid and at times, haunting.I loved all of the poems but my favourites were The Applicant, Lady Lazarus, Cut, Death & Co and Daddy. Of these Daddy is the best. Daddy may be one of the best poems ever written.

It is Sylvia Plath's Ariel which is about as much as I can say having been blown away by it. It's like being punched or stabbed (in a good way) by every image.

Beautiful and haunting but there are surprising moments of joy and hope. Apparently it was meant to end with the ‘wintering’ triology until Ted rearranged it. Overall it is just essential poetry for anyone vaguely interested into the subject. She was brilliant and unique and unrivalled.