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Ariel

4.27 of 5 stars 4.27 · rating details · 18,113 ratings · 532 reviews

"In these poems...Sylvia Plath becomes herself, becomes something imaginary, newly, wildly and subtly created."
-- From the Introduction by Robert Lowell

Paperback, 128 pages

Published February 3rd 1999 by Harper Perennial Modern Classics (first published 1965)

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Aug 24, 2010 Elizabeth rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Who wouldn't I recommend this to?

Shelves: 2010, in-by-of-the-americas, in-by-of-england, poetry, reviewed

I hate writing about poetry. I can never capture what it feels like to read the poems. And why bother? Why talk about the imagery when it is easier to quote the poem? Look, there it is. Brilliant. And you're done, but how boring, too. If I can't speak about something, how do I know I really understand it? Maybe it's hard to write about because I don't really understand it. Certainly with Sylvia Plath, I am not entirely sure I want to understand. When I The Bell Jar in college, I ended up eating...more I hate writing about poetry. I can never capture what it feels like to read the poems. And why bother? Why talk about the imagery when it is easier to quote the poem? Look, there it is. Brilliant. And you're done, but how boring, too. If I can't speak about something, how do I know I really understand it? Maybe it's hard to write about because I don't really understand it. Certainly with Sylvia Plath, I am not entirely sure I want to understand. When I The Bell Jar in college, I ended up eating a jar of peanut butter and standing on a cliff in the rain, looking into the night and the North Sea. That book would make Tara Reid reflective and melancholy (I know, I am assuming she knows how to read).

I can't imagine what it would be like really understand Plath's writing. Her daughter, who wrote the introduction to this edition, says that people constructed their own images of Plath, the feminists had a particular version that was bound and helpless under Ted Hughes's thumb. Her daughter said that we, the readers of Ariel, would never really know her mother through this work. That there was a specific voice to these poems, new for Plath, but not any more the real voice than the one in The Colossus or The Bell Jar.

I think with Plath, it is hard not to think you know her, with all of her poems about the ordinary domestic feelings of women: cutting your finger while slicing vegetables; feeling heavy like a cow as you pick up the baby; children always there, crying; watching an animal in the yard. All of these little domestic things, this writing about the woman's body from the perspective of the woman inside it, these feelings about children and their constant attention, all of them are real experiences for women. Immediately, one identifies with this Ariel voice, this woman writing about being an ordinary woman, And I don't know if it is something we just do naturally, but we I identify with that woman. We I naturally want to make her my friend. Isn't she? Didn't I just read these impossibly personal poems? I have no training to do otherwise. I have no desire to do otherwise. Without really knowing the author, without having met her and talked to her, and without properly understanding, my mind, and the feminists and the poets and the Americans and the British, all of us, fill in the gaps with the rest of the story: the white space between the poems. We fill in what the poet did not reveal and shaped the lost Plath to our liking.

It is always a risk with an author, right? It's harder to restrain yourself when the author is a confessional poet. It's harder still when she is that good. Every poem exposes her and me and the images she raises, seemingly from the air and the dead. Getting close to the poems is like rubbing a raw place. Lady Lazarus is like pouring lemon juice on it, especially with Daddy in the pages ahead. She creates a need for comfort. Then she gives it to you. There were to be five poems about bees at the end of the book, which didn't quite happen in the original publication, and they are comforting, in a way, in the only way I think she would want to provide comfort to a stranger, her reader, at a time when she couldn't comfort herself.

I am still rather lost here. I see the words at the end of Lady Lazarus, the way they are printed on the page, and I imagine all sorts of images for them rather than the one I know exists behind the words because that one is so dark and horrible. She makes me cold and wanting peanut butter again. She is fearsome and powerful and vengeful and beautiful, and I am thankful that I never had to feel her scorn or anger. This silent shadow of it on these few pages is strong enough.(less)

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Dec 28, 2011 Trevor rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: literature, poetry

I have always meant to read a book about the life of Sylvia Plath and to learn about the whole Ted Hughes adventure – but something there is that doesn’t love that kind of voyeurism and to date I have avoided it. There is a sense, however, where I think Plath’s poetry is so intensely personal that it would make sense to read it knowing more of the story of the American poet who killed herself on the bleak winter’s day in the year in which I was born.

This ‘reinstatement’ of Plath’s Ariel has a fo...more

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Sep 17, 2009 Manny rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: strongly-recommended, why-not-call-it-poetry

When I was a kid, I loved stories about intrepid explorers who visited places no one had ever seen before, and died heroically in the attempt. I guess Scott of the Antarctic is the canonical example - though later on, I discovered to my surprise that Norwegians just think he was an idiot who didn't prepare carefully, and that Amundsen was the real hero. There is a wonderful episode in Jan Kjærstad's Erobreren which contrasts the English and Norwegian views of these two great men.

So what's this g...more When I was a kid, I loved stories about intrepid explorers who visited places no one had ever seen before, and died heroically in the attempt. I guess Scott of the Antarctic is the canonical example - though later on, I discovered to my surprise that Norwegians just think he was an idiot who didn't prepare carefully, and that Amundsen was the real hero. There is a wonderful episode in Jan Kjærstad's Erobreren which contrasts the English and Norwegian views of these two great men.

So what's this got to do with Ariel? I was trying to figure out why I like it so much (it's been one of my absolute favorite pieces of poetry since I first came across it as a teenager), and it struck me that maybe I admired it for similar reasons. Sylvia Plath went on an expedition to a sort of emotional Antarctica, a place most people have heard of but never visited, where you experience love so intensely that it ends up killing you. Before that happened, however, she managed to send back detailed reports of what she'd found there. Perhaps another reason why I associate her and the brave Captain Scott is that she died during the English winter of 1963. I was five at the time, and some of my first memories are of the bitter cold, and of how incredibly deep the snow was. I remember that we were snowed in, and that my father shovelled a path to the house next door, so that we could at least visit them. The snow was much higher than his head. A few hundred miles away, Sylvia had left her husband, and was living in London with her two children. She killed herself on February 11.

Here are some of the passages from Ariel that I think of most often. I have always assumed that the title poem is about having sex with Ted Hughes, though I found out recently that it's also about her horse. It ends like this:

...White
Godiva, I unpeel -
Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child's cry

Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,

The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

The beginning of Elm is another of my favourite passages, which expresses better than anything else I can think of just how painful love can be. I remember once showing it to a friend who's had a rather difficult life (we'd been having some discussion about poetry). She seemed almost physically affected; I remember she turned pale, and couldn't finish reading it. I wished I'd had more sense:

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing...

And I love the end of Nick and the Candlestick, which she apparently wrote to her son, two years old at the time:

O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.

Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses,
With soft rugs--

The last of Victoriana.
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well,

You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.

I was so shocked when I read earlier this year that he had also killed himself. But when someone's written a poem like this about you, you're as immortal as the unnamed subject of Shakespeare's Sonnet XVIII.

By the way, most people have been very dismissive of the movie with Gwynneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig. I seem to be one of the rare exceptions; the script was nothing special, but I thought Paltrow had done a fine job of capturing her personality on screen.

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Nov 12, 2012 Paul rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: the-sylvia-and-ted-show

Inspired by Paul Legault's brilliant idea of translating Emily Dickinson's poems into English, I thought immediately - I have to steal that idea. So here are some of the Ariel poems of Sylvia Plath translated into English. I have, of course, tried my utmost to perform this task with tact, discretion and good taste.

ARIEL TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH

ELM.

Look, let's get this straight. I am a tree, you are a woman. We can never be together, not in the way you'd like, anyway. Plus, you're kind of irritati...more

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Mar 23, 2009 A.K. rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: poetry, bloody-ice-cream, i-me-mind, reviewed-by-yt

I am the type seemingly predestined for Plath worship. Oh, it's easy: white, female, feminist, literary, dark-sided. And I've been disavowing my girl Sylvia for a while now, leery of guilt by association. Scandals, hype and armies of ersatz Plaths have watered down public opinion, which is what it is, but life and legend are not the sum of literature. Ariel is baptism by fire. When I read this at thirteen or fourteen it blew up a new space in my mind to make a place where poetry could feel like...more

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Jun 14, 2013 Kirsty rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-it-swap-it-2012, read-2012, best-of-2012, poetry, treasured-authors, read-2013, best-of-2013, poetry-book-club

There is something so very special about crafting a poetry review. It is at once daunting and exciting, like humming a new tune to yourself. Sometimes it can sound a little discordant, but if you strike the pattern of notes, it can be a thing of beauty. With Plath's poems, no words of mine could ever hope to match her dark and wondrous skill, so I have decided to just assemble a lot of lovely quotes instead.

- 'Love, love, / I have hung our cave with roses'

- 'In any case, you are always there, /...more

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Jul 14, 2007 brook rated it 5 of 5 stars

i studied this collection senior year of college in my "hand of the poet" seminar. i wrote a 20 page paper on 3 poems from here. i studied plath's handwriting. i analyzed the placement of each poem, and how hughes (sorry to say) kind of screwed everything up in that regard. to me, this is the ultimate. when i think of good poetry, this is the first thing that pops into my head. when i accidently cut my finger chopping up vegetables for dinner, i immediately begin reciting "cut" to myself. these...more

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Feb 15, 2013 Samadrita rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Every one

Shelves: poetry, feminism-feminist-undertones, american-literature, 1001-and-more, awesomesauce, melancholia, gave-me-misty-eyes, cherished, re-readable, by-women-who-matter

It probably won't be right to draw comparisons between the Sylvia Plath who wrote Mad Girl's Love Song during her time at Smith's and the Sylvia Plath of Ariel. There's a world of difference between a Sylvia merely mourning lost love and a bitter, lonesome, vengeful, depressed Sylvia trying to live out the last vestiges of a tumultuous life by seeking a form of catharsis through these poems. And, indeed, a very personal set of poems these are.
It took me a while to get through this book not only...more

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Feb 27, 2011 Steve rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: poetry, 2d-readings-the-good-stuff

Since about 1980 I have probably read Ariel six times, and once again I step back from it thinking, My God! It remains for me the most powerful collection of poetry that I’ve ever read. However, I should probably scratch that word “remains,” since my previous readings had me in awe of numerous poems within the collection. But with this new edition, I am reading for the first time, Plath’s arrangement, which jacks things up considerably (How could that be possible?). I have no side in the Hughes...more Since about 1980 I have probably read Ariel six times, and once again I step back from it thinking, My God! It remains for me the most powerful collection of poetry that I’ve ever read. However, I should probably scratch that word “remains,” since my previous readings had me in awe of numerous poems within the collection. But with this new edition, I am reading for the first time, Plath’s arrangement, which jacks things up considerably (How could that be possible?). I have no side in the Hughes / Plath wars. He cheated on her; she was high maintenance. As an outsider, it’s impossible to know much more beyond that surface story. On the poetry side of things, I have always thought that Hughes (a superb poet), with his violent and powerful imagery (see Crow) provided an assist in Plath’s own growth as a poet. And being the smart girl that she was, she would not be outdone in savage imagery, especially when Hughes provided her, though his adultery, with a red hot core of poetic purpose.

And I don’t think this can be downplayed in any way. Frieda Hughes, the couple’s daughter, says so clearly in her (indispensible) Introduction, acknowledging (what we all know) that Ariel is an act of revenge. For Frieda, this is a difficult and sensitive subject. She loved her father, she loved her mother. She does try to recycle – though she doesn’t necessarily agree -- the old Hughes argument that the earlier arrangement was done for Art’s sake. Not so, not even close. There are a few poems that could have been dropped as weak (“Barren Woman” and “Magi” being agreed upon examples), but overall the restored poems are very strong. Moreover, it’s their placement that matters. If Plath’s collection was an act of literary revenge, Hughes' editing was an also an act of literary violence. He deliberately muddied the waters, blurring the impact of the collection as a whole. You see this in both the beginning and ending of the collection. The new edition follows an arc, an arc that, with all its ferocious savagery, strangely enough becomes transcendent with the last grouping of poems, which ends with “Wintering.” In the earlier edition of Ariel, Hughes has these poems (starting with “Daddy”) in sequence, but then tacked on a monkey’s tail grab bag of poems that robs the reader of the sense of closure that Plath’s arrangement provides. (It also helps to dilute the impact of the accusatory “Daddy.”)

But it’s the beginning that really shocked me. The dropping of “The Rabbit Catcher,” a very strong poem, and one that must of burned Hughes' ears right off, is where the violence to Plath’s purpose is most obvious. It’s a key poem, since it establishes a foundation for the recurring accusatory poems (“A Secret,” “The Jailer,” “Daddy,” and I’m sure others), and these poems are part of an intended tapestry. I have no doubt that this restored version of Ariel will be the one that will now be studied, argued over, etc., from now on. Hughes' deceptive version will also be studied, but it will exist now as a footnote. It’s a testimony to the power of Plath’s poems that Ariel can exist in both forms, but there is no doubt which is the better version.
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Sep 17, 2007 Jenna rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: english-language-poetry

There are two adjectives commonly applied to this book by people who haven't read it: it is often said to be a "feminist" book, and a "depressing" one. I think these two not-quite-accurate labels arise so frequently because Sylvia Plath is, unfortunately, better-known to the general public for being female and psychologically troubled than for being an accomplished poet.

This is not an agenda-driven book, it is not a book aimed at only a select audience, and it is, above all, not a depressing boo...more There are two adjectives commonly applied to this book by people who haven't read it: it is often said to be a "feminist" book, and a "depressing" one. I think these two not-quite-accurate labels arise so frequently because Sylvia Plath is, unfortunately, better-known to the general public for being female and psychologically troubled than for being an accomplished poet.

This is not an agenda-driven book, it is not a book aimed at only a select audience, and it is, above all, not a depressing book. "Ariel" contains poems of awe ("Morning Song"), poems of biting irony ("The Applicant"), and poems of exhilaration so intense that it blurs the line between wanting to live and wanting to die ("Ariel"), but in all of these poems Plath's fighting spirit is evident. The anger, the rage, the *bite* of the poems about her reaction to her husband's adultery seem to me to be the mark of someone who is fighting so hard to reclaim her life because she so desperately wants to live. These are *not* the poems of someone who has turned her face to the wall and resigned herself to defeat. "I am too pure for you or anyone," she asserts (with a defiant head-toss, perhaps) in one poem. In another poem, one that tells of a swarm of bees that kamikaze-attacked a man (to punish him for his "lies," it would seem), she says, "They thought death was worth it, but I/Have a self to recover, a queen." This "queen" of the bees is transparently a symbol for Plath's inner self, which had hitherto been lain dormant beneath the weighty tarps of depression, and it is described in language that is harrowingly alive, evoking metaphors of healing and resurrection: "Now she is flying/More terrible than she ever was, red/Scar in the sky, red comet/Over the engine that killed her--/The mausoleum, the wax house." In short, these are forcefully galloping, life-affirming poems. Just as some people lose their battles against cancer or other diseases, Plath ultimately lost her battle against depression, but these poems suggest that it wasn't for lack of trying. The final poem in this restored edition speaks of how the battle was a close one, whose outcome was still in question up until the very end: "This is the time of hanging on.... Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas/Succeed in banking their fires/To enter another year?/What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?/The bees are flying. They taste the spring."(less)

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Apr 15, 2009 Punk rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: poetry

Poetry. This volume appeals to me on more of an academic level than a personal one. I feel like if I just spent enough time with it, I could figure out Plath's cipher and decode her metaphors. Written in the last two months before her suicide, these poems feel like they're all part of the same machine, like they're building something bigger. There's a lot of repetition, a lot of language being used in similar ways, like you could pull one thread (black, trains, Jews, bees) and watch the pages wr...more

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Aug 08, 2007 henry rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: poetry

an outstanding collection of poems. don't let her reputation fool you, just because she's every depressed high schooler's favorite poet doesn't mean she's not damn good. Concision, passion, attention to detail, and verbs that will straight up eat you. And what's more, there's an undercurrent of what we think of today as the rhythm of slam poetry in her work, certain poems have that spoken momentum that we associate with slam without all the cheesiness and predictability. read it again, you won't...more

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Apr 15, 2013 Patrick rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2013

"You say I should drown my girl.
She'll cut her throat at ten if she's mad at two." --Lesbos

"I do not want much of a present, anyway, this year.
After all, I am alive only by accident." --A Birthday Present

"I could not run without having to run forever." --The Bee Meeting

Having only read The Bell Jar years ago, this was my first experience with Plath's poetry, and I loved it. A lot of it I found very cryptic, but all these great lines would cut through the fog and jump out at me periodically. The...more

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Feb 15, 2013 Eun Pyung rated it 4 of 5 stars

I liked "Ariel" immensely. It was the first collection of poems I ever read, and the first time I ever found myself immersed in poetry. Because it was the first collection I read, I cannot compare it to other collections, though I don't see why a comparison would be necessary. My dalliance with poetry has been infrequent and insincere. I read poems only when my English teachers forced me to read them, or when my History teachers cited them to evoke the general mood of the time I was studying.

My...more

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Jan 09, 2013 Mamdouh Abdullah rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

سيلفيا بلاث شاعرة أكثر منها روائية. أتذكر أول مرة قرأت فيه قصائد لها. لم تعجبني إطلاقاً. قصائدها مغرقة في الذاتية, تدور حول موضوع واحد تكتب عنه بكل شغف وبأعصاب باردة. هناك آراء تقول أنه من الأفضل فصل الحياة الخاصة عن العمل الأدبي, إذ من الأفضل أن يحدث العمل أدبي أثراً بمعزل عن الحياة الخاصة للمؤلف. إذا أحدث النص تأثيراً وكان هناك تفاعلاً سيمتد الأمر للحياة الخاصة للبحث في تفاصيل العمل. من الصعب فصل الحياة الخاصة لسيلفيا بلاث عن أعمالها الكاملة, من قصيدة ورواية. بل وأجد أن التعرف على حياة سيلفيا...more سيلفيا بلاث شاعرة أكثر منها روائية. أتذكر أول مرة قرأت فيه قصائد لها. لم تعجبني إطلاقاً. قصائدها مغرقة في الذاتية, تدور حول موضوع واحد تكتب عنه بكل شغف وبأعصاب باردة. هناك آراء تقول أنه من الأفضل فصل الحياة الخاصة عن العمل الأدبي, إذ من الأفضل أن يحدث العمل أدبي أثراً بمعزل عن الحياة الخاصة للمؤلف. إذا أحدث النص تأثيراً وكان هناك تفاعلاً سيمتد الأمر للحياة الخاصة للبحث في تفاصيل العمل. من الصعب فصل الحياة الخاصة لسيلفيا بلاث عن أعمالها الكاملة, من قصيدة ورواية. بل وأجد أن التعرف على حياة سيلفيا الخاصة هو مفتاح يستطيع من خلالها القارئ أن يتفاعل مع سيلفيا إيجابياً وبصورة أكبر. في إحدى قصائدها ترسم صورة لنمر يسير على إثرها محاولاً افتراسها. وهو يهرول للبحث عنها صارخاًَ بأن لا حقيقة إلا الدماء ويجب أن تسفك. في محاولة من الراوي للهرب من هذا النمر ترمي له أجزاء من ذاتها لكي يتوقف, تجرح نفسها وترش الدماء في محاولة أخيرة لإيقاف هذا النمر. غير أنها حين توصد على نفسها الباب وتتيقن بأنها في حالة سلام تاما, تجد النمر على السلم, ورويداً رويداً يصعد الدرجات. هذه القصيدة إحدى القصائد القليلة التي أستطيع التفاعل مع جمالياتها بمعزل عن المؤلف نفسه. قصيدة أخرى أستطيع أن أتفاعل معها بمعزل عن المؤلف, قصيدة (أبي) رغم أن هذه القصيدة هي أكثر ارتباطاً بالكاتبة وحياتها, وأشد قصائدها سوداوية وشهرة. هناك فتاة تبحث عن ظلال الرجل الذي بفقده أصبحت الحياة مستحيلة. بدل أن يظهر ذلك الحنين الجارف إلى وجود الأب كرمز للأمان ظهر كصورة متوحشة. كيف يصبح الكره والقتل طريقة للرثاء والفقد؟ سيلفيا فعلتها في هذه القصيدة. حين تصرح بأنه كان عليها بأن تقتله فهي داخلياً تعلن عن حب جامح وقلق هائل استولى عليها. حب لذلك الرجل, الأب. وقلق هائل لحالة الضياع التي أوجدها بعد رحيله بثلاثين سنة. كانت في العاشرة حين رحل الأب, وكانت في العشرين حيت حاولت أن تسير على دربه, أن ترحل. وفي الثلاثين لا مفر من السير والعودة لذلك الطريق ذاته, طريق النمر. إذ أن هناك سبع سنين ممتدة كانت جحيم, سبع سنين ظنت فيها الشاعرة أنها وجدت صورة أخرى حية لأبيها, غير أن هذا الرجل رفع السيف وأحدث تأثيراً فتح الطريق من خلاله أن تعبر سيلفيا إلى أبيها: “كل خلية مني كانت تهرول إليك”.

هذا الكتاب هو الأهم شعرياً في سيرة سيلفيا بلاث الشعرية. لأنه أول كتاب نالاً نجاحاً أدبياً ظاهراً. يضم غالبية قصائدها السوداوية والمفرطة في الذاتية. بالإضافة لقصيدة أبي هناك قصيدة التوليب. وهي مستمدة من تجربتها الذاتية لحظة خضوعها للعلاج في المستشفى. قد يجد القارئ فيها تشابهاً مع نصها الروائي الناقوس الزجاجي. وقصيدة السيدة لعازر ذات المقطوعات الثلاثية.

لمن يريد قراءة قصيدة أبي, عليه بأن يقرأها ويسمعها بصوت سيلفيا بلاث نفسها, لأنها تجيد تقديم نفسها بالشكل والصورة التي تريد. (less)

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May 17, 2012 Jeremy Ra rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

If all poetry strives to defy expectations, Plath certainly is the nemesis of clichés. The readers of her work incessantly find themselves in breathless astonishment because of the explosive language, the surprising imageries, and the immense honesty with which she unveils her personal events and emotions (though I cannot stress enough the importance of not letting what you might have already heard about her life constrain your interpretation of her poems).

This collection shows Plath at her bes...more

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Apr 29, 2012 Ken rated it 5 of 5 stars

Her face never gave it away. American blond, pretty, 32 white teeth all in a row. Born in Boston she liked the sea, and would often go to it for comfort, for images. The first time they found her she was already gone, pumped full of sleeping pills. She was 28 then, so they brought her back, and stuck her together with glue for another 2 years. But you couldn’t see what made her tick from the pictures of her face. You had to read her poems for that. There she was confessional in a way that her fa...more

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Oct 08, 2011 Chris rated it 3 of 5 stars

This was a very tormented selection of poems that courageously speaks to the revelation of agony. Honestly, I wish I understood more than I did. I didn’t mind Plath’s elusiveness as much because I felt it was sincere, and it makes a difference knowing that Plath was afflicted with emotional and mental anguish, writing these poems right before committing suicide by sticking her head in an unlit oven and dying of carbon monoxide poisoning. It wasn’t MERELY the whining of a drama queen.

The poems I...more

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Jul 09, 2010 Ella rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: poetry, reviewed

Rough thoughts which probably don't make much sense:

I fell in love with these poems twenty years ago when I heard Ned Rorem's song cycle which uses them as text. As a 20-year-old morose young woman, I wanted desperately to sing them, but they were not really written for my voice. I'd known Plath's poetry, of course, since I was a black-turtleneck-wearing morose teenager. She and Anne Sexton were committed to memory, and I did the obligatory "Girl, Interrupted" stint to make the image complete. I...more Rough thoughts which probably don't make much sense:

I fell in love with these poems twenty years ago when I heard Ned Rorem's song cycle which uses them as text. As a 20-year-old morose young woman, I wanted desperately to sing them, but they were not really written for my voice. I'd known Plath's poetry, of course, since I was a black-turtleneck-wearing morose teenager. She and Anne Sexton were committed to memory, and I did the obligatory "Girl, Interrupted" stint to make the image complete. I still like the more traditional and well-known Plath better. Who can beat "Lady Lazarus" or "Mad Girl's Love Song?" Well, actually, many can and do beat them (Yeats' "Lake Isle of Innisfree" jumps immediately to mind,) but the poems of Ariel still stand on their own legs, even if they are uncomfortable in their shoes.

It was a different time, and women were very different. As a woman who grew up in the heat of the 70s, with everyone telling girls that "[we:] could be President some day" and the myth of bra burnings, and Gloria Steinem & her like getting the ERA as close as it's EVER been to being passed by Congress, my future seemed like it would be perfect -- or at least perfectly unmarked by the stigma of lacking a penis.(heh!)

For many years, I assumed that the Equal Rights Amendment had actually been passed, but then my belief in equality was trashed by the unfortunate truth. Even with a female Speaker of the House, American women are shockingly unequal in many ways, and Congress -- full of more women with every year -- doesn't seem to want to do anything about it, nor do the women of 2010.

That's the place that these poems take me -- the strange place where the women of 2010 live, whether they choose to see it or not.

These poems feel strangely uncomfortable and uncomfortably familiar in many ways. I agree, in part, with Adrienne Rich's sentiment: "We have had enough suicidal women poets [and their:] self-destructiveness." Yet, if I'm honest, and I do try to be, some of these feelings ring disturbingly true. My bitterness at the idea that the world would change and women would be completely equal by the time I reached 12, let alone 42 -- the fact that women my age have been dragged back and forth through various versions of "feminism", and the fact that women as a whole seem to have backed off from the issue for fear of being labeled unfeminine or femi-Nazis, is troubling to think about. So most of us simply go along and get along and try not to think about the amazing contradiction in which we all live.

So when Plath discusses the imposition of a male will on her whole being, it should sound completely foreign to me, a professional woman in 2010, yet I can reach to any magazine in the waiting room to see a Photo-shopped young sex kitten, lips parted, waiting in orgasmic dewy perfection for some man to come rescue her (and buy the obligatory car/deodorant/jeans/soup/whatever that comes with her.) And that sex kitten is what makes Plath's passages like the oft-quoted bit from "The Jailer" below so disturbing and unsettling and revolting yet true all at the same time:

I have been drugged and raped.
Seven hours knocked out of my right mind
Into a black sack
Where I relax, foetus or cat,
Lever of his wet dreams.

I'm stuck trying to explain how that supposedly-horrible passage is so different from the nearly naked, dewy, wet-lipped woman-child selling men everything from soup to sex today. Stuck because it doesn't seem that different to me.

There is a lot more to discuss about these poems, not the least of which is exactly how Plath actually wanted them arranged, what her husband and daughter have done to them since, which poems "belong" to the cycle and which don't, but I'm not a literary critic. I'm a woman living in the ever confusing world of "you can be whatever you want... so long as you aren't too fat, too old, too ugly AND ALSO you'd better be sexy and competent and feminine and not a bitch when you are in charge of anyone else at work or otherwise." I feel like "they" are consistent in wanting me to shut up and have a good time, only now I'd better be able to do so while running a company, in high heels which make my own fairly capable-yet-shapely legs about as comfortable as these poems.

(less)

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Jul 01, 2009 Jennn rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2009, poetry, favs

1st draft of review:
To be honest, I was a little nervous when I first grabbed the book from the library. This was Plath’s last book and last poetry in her life, and many of the poems I had grown up with. I wanted to read this book very carefully. I wanted to make sure that nostalgia wouldn’t cloud my review, or the huge fame that surrounds this book. But, thankfully, the more I read, the more those trivial worries faded and I was immersed in Plath. Sometimes the poems lose focus, sometimes they’...more

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Dec 22, 2010 Joe Strong rated it 4 of 5 stars

When I first brought Ariel, I figured that it was not going to be a summer read (despite the fact I took it to France). However, as someone who was relatively new to the confessional nature of writing, I became engrossed.
What Plath provides is simply, brilliance. Subjective brilliance; a predisposition that a woman writing on how society views the female voice is a lesbian probably means that her poetry is not for you. I still fail to believe that this was Plath’s third anthology, a true testame...more

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Jun 11, 2007 Carolanne rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Sometimes, I am a very literal person. And this was one of those times. Which means, as you can guess, this didn't really float my boat. It kills me that I don't know exactily what the author means or can't even guess because they use such abstract terms. Some of the poems were really great, but that was only because I had watched the movie about her life and knew what was going on. I guess I am not a big poetry fan...and that makes me sad.
Liked "the Bell Jar" a lot better.

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Jul 18, 2012 Richard rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I am eternally grateful to my English 'A' Level teacher, Mrs. Mills, for giving me this incredible collection of poems to study.

I'd never heard of Plath (or Hughes) and was taken aback by the imagery, the rhythm and the barely-tethered (and sometimes loosed) rage in her poems.

The writing is just absolutely beautiful, every word seems to have been chosen, examined for impact before being lovingly placed in the poem.

Contrary to a lot of reviews I read the poems imagery and metaphor are often ver...more

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Jan 06, 2011 Claudia rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: classics-i-should-have-read-years-b

I don't begin to pretend I understood all of these poems, or all of any one of them. But I love them...the sounds, the images. The fierceness often takes my breath away. Her images of the ordinary life of a mother contrasts with the violence, the hooks, the hisses, the shrieks, the worms. More than this, tho, THIS edition has restored Plath's original plan for her collection. Her suicide meant Ted Hughes controlled the editorial decisions for publication and he did not follow her wishes. Another...more

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Jun 17, 2013 Anduriña Teodora rated it 4 of 5 stars

I don't believe that Sylvia Plath becomes herself in these poems, she becomes something else. A metaphysical entity that inhabits different personas. Who she really is wants to be someone other than herself. I've never read a body of work with such self-loathing. However while she's so self-loathing, she's also self-obsessive. Even in "Daddy" and "Nicholas and the Candlestick" which are about the people in her life, revolve around the speaker, as is she were a god. All of the characters are in h...more

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May 27, 2013 Filipa rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: college-related, english-books, library, not-own, poetry

I cannot exactly describe what I felt throughout the reading of this collection of poems. Poetry for me is something that cannot be dissected or thoroughly analyzed. Well, of course they can. But I think that poems have a raw beauty that does not have to be dis-constructed in order to be understood or recognized. And for me, it makes more sense to absorb the poem and its beauty as a whole than to analyze it line by line. I will not analyze Plath's poetry nor will I scrutinize it - I have done th...more

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Apr 18, 2013 Serena rated it 4 of 5 stars

Ariel by Sylvia Plath is a collection that she crafted near the end of her life, before her suicide, according to the forward by Robert Lowell. These poems are what Plath has been best know for, other than The Bell Jar, and these poems are by turns blunt and dark as she refers to death at nearly every turn and the fleeting nature of life. Her poems are not only confessional in nature about her emotions and life, but they also examine the bittersweet nature of life and being a woman.

In “Elm,” the...more

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Sep 20, 2011 Amanda Hankins rated it 5 of 5 stars

Ariel: Sylvia Plath
It is hard for me to say anything bad about this tragically beautiful collection of poems. What is so special about this edition of Sylvia’s poetry is the introduction written by her and Ted Hughes daughter. She claims that her mother’s true voice and the interpretation of the masses is wrong in this book. The diehard feminist fans fainted as the female daughter defends the “brute” force and heavy burden that was Ted Hughes. However it is still Sylvia’s craft of the word and...more

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Jan 17, 2011 Richard rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011

Personal opinion: I dislike confessional poetry. I think that both poets and their readers would be better off if confessional poets bought journals to put all their navel-gazing thoughts into. Aspiring poets: please don't exploit your dirty laundry to create a persona of the tortured artist (not saying Ms. Plath did this, but I have my doubts about most of her followers). As poetry goes, I prefer Walt Whitman, who writes universal poetry for all people.
But is all self-lacerating, clove-cigaret...more

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Mar 17, 2012 Amy rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, 2012-reads

I'm a bit of an unashamed Sylvia Plath fan. I first read The Bell Jar when I was 13, and her life and journals are a constant source of real fascination for me. I hadn't, however, encountered any of her poetry outside of the parts of her journals I've read and so seeing this in my Uni library catalogue made me instantly grab the chance to read it.

The poems that make up Ariel were discovered after Plath had committed suicide, and they're certainly not easy to read. Although there are moments of a...more

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About Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer.

Known primarily for her poetry, Plath also wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. The book's protagonist, Esther Greenwood, is a bright, ambitious student at Smith College who begins to experience a mental breakdown while interning for a fashion magazine in New York. The plot paralle...more

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Quotes from Ariel

“If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.” — 1,059 people liked it

“Dying is an art.
Like everything else,
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I have a call.” — 738 people liked it

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