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Aug 24, 2010

Elizabeth rated it:

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...

24 comments like (37 people liked it)

Dec 28, 2011

Trevor rated it:

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 A More...

32 comments like (22 people liked it)

Sep 17, 2009

Manny rated it:

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 w More...

29 comments like (15 people liked it)

Dec 02, 2011

A.K. rated it:

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...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jul 14, 2007

brook rated it:

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 More...

4 comments like (3 people liked it)

Feb 27, 2011

Steve rated it:

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 More...

11 comments like (15 people liked it)

Jun 17, 2010

Jenna rated it:

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 i More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Apr 15, 2009

Punk rated it:

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...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

henry rated it:

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 w More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 08, 2011

Chris rated it:

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.

More...

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Jul 09, 2010

Ella rated it:

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 More...

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Jul 01, 2009

Jennn rated it:

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 More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Dec 22, 2010

Joe rated it:

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 t More...

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Jun 17, 2010

Carolanne rated it:

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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Jan 06, 2011

Claudia rated it:

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...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 20, 2011

Amanda rated it:

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 wo More...

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Jan 17, 2011

Richard rated it:

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-c More...

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Jul 22, 2009

Reginacm rated it:

Intense and depressing...

THE MOON AND THE YEW TREE

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,
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.
Fumey, spiritous mists inhabit this place
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.
The moon is no door. It is a face in i More...

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Oct 12, 2010

John rated it:

"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 More...

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Oct 25, 2009

Jason rated it:

People ask me how to gauge good poetry. Not that i'm a king or anything, but it's a legitimate question. Really a good poem can be a badly written poem, it depends (for instance, there are poetic elements to propaganda that i like.) It all depends on how lyrical and fetching the image is, whether it can convey feeling. That's my idea, anyway. And as far as unnerving, moving but quiet intensity goes, Sylvia Plath takes the cake. She's incredible!

She entices different interpretat More...

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Apr 19, 2009

Lettie rated it:

This has happened several times now. Friends or family sitting around after dinner, and people begin reciting their favorite poems, in whole or in part. It's wonderful being around people who love the rhythm of language. I join in with my favorites from Sylvia Plath and, well...it kind of stops things. Stares and silence. Poems about suicide and father hatred can do that I guess. Yet these are the ones stuck in my head, not because I share the sentiments but because the poems are so bold, More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 29, 2010

Austyn rated it:

One necessary stage of interpretation when reading Plath’s poetry is to sort through the multitude of personal and intellectual references that make up one of her poems.
Plath and Hughes often took and reconstructed images from each other’s work. For example, well-known Plath scholar Diane Middlebrook aligns Plath’s poem “The Rabbit Catcher”, Hughe’s “Difficulties of a Bridegroom” and Plath’s “Kindness” in a nasty war of words circling around D. H. Lawrence's "Rabbit Snared in the Nig More...

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Jan 29, 2012

Mike rated it:

It's hard to describe how you "liked" poetry, how it related to you, what connections and millions of linkages you made, so eh.

The imagery of her being a bee in a dying hive, being surrounded by doctors with sideways beaks for mouths, being surrounded by translucent veils on her birthday, the gift of tulips disturbing and hooking into your heart as they steal your peace etc. were all strong and disturbing and I could picture this woman sitting in her house feeling all of t More...

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Jul 29, 2010

Cami rated it:

I'm stepping out alone on this review, it seems. This venue is littered with four and five star reviews for Ariel.

Other than a few poems that truly do shine, I'm going to have to say that I don't think Sylvia Plath was not a consistently good poet.

Poetry gains deeper meaning when we learn more about a poet. When we (think) we understand the place they were in (physically or mentally), we begin to see the symbols and imagery they laid out as something we connect to and th More...

3 comments like (2 people liked it)

Mar 24, 2011

Felix rated it:

Reading this collection is a little like performing surgery and staring directly into the brain. Raw, dark, split, each piece is a Freudian dream filled with the desperate tug-of-war between a woman's cultural and biological imperative, and the creative process.

By forcing yourself to look beyond the self-addressing, seemingly self-absorbed, 'I', you will find a piece of art which envelops a generation very much caught between the future and the past, and still unsure about it's place i More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Apr 14, 2009

Nic rated it:

Was much annoyed to find that this is the 1965 version put together by her husband, Ted Hughes – who both added and subtracted a bunch to her original sketch of the manuscript. The real thing, her intended version, was republished in 2004. Oh well.

What did I think of it? Diamond-hard, caustic, over-wrought, hectic. Exhausting. Brilliant. Obscure. Obscure personal code, one thought, frequently. Everything desperate and tense, and zero-sum. And distinctive, distinctive as hell. The one More...

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Jan 15, 2008

Faith-Anne rated it:

"Ariel" is one of my favorite collections of poetry. Plath really speaks to me. I can feel not only the pain in her poetry, but also the beauty.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 02, 2010

Patricia rated it:

Ariel is among 10 books of poetry that I have pulled from my shelves that I have not yet read. If I want to write poetry, I need to study how other poets work though I didn't think I could understand a suicidal poet. Why was that all I could ever hear about Sylvia Plath? Certainly, much more has been said in my presence, but none of it ever penetrated. I loved the bee series and "Totem" and "Sheep in Fog." I think at this stage of my life, I found it easier to read Plath's re More...

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Jan 31, 2012

Erika rated it:

Awesome. Sylvia Plath is the master of illiteration. Some of her poetry is full of disturbing imagery, but her voice is solid. Lady Lazarus is one of my favorite poems of all time. If interested in looking more into the poetry of Sylvia Plath, I would offer the advice of possibly reading her biography first. Much of her poetry is better enjoyed with a deeper understanding of her life, pursuits, and family. The most alarmingly intriguing thing about Plath's writing is her voice. I notice t More...

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Nov 09, 2010

Mark rated it:

It's interesting - I returned to Ariel after having first read it about 10 years ago, and I can honestly say my reaction was completely different the second time around. I simply did not appreciate it as much this time. Perhaps it has something to do with timing, as I imagine a reader's response to Plath likely depends largely on their frame of mind at the time.

I've never been a huge fan of the confessionalist mode of poetry, though I admit that I like Plath better than many of her s More...

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