Poetry
Ariel
Sylvia Plath · 1965
Synopsis
About forty poems, written for the most part in the last months of a life, many at four in the morning, before the baby's cry. A woman rides a horse at daybreak and the gallop becomes a flight towards the sun. A sick woman in her room looks at a bunch of red tulips whose colour exhausts her. Another speaks to a father who died in her childhood and gives him the features of an executioner. Yet another counts her resurrections and announces them like a fairground act.
Context
Its author had left a bound manuscript, whose title she had changed four times before settling on this one. Her husband removed a dozen poems, added as many, and altered the order: this is the version that appeared in 1965 and made its reputation. The selection and sequence she had settled on were published only in 2004, with a foreword by their daughter Frieda Hughes. The two volumes do not read in the same way.
Who it is for
A short collection, of sustained intensity. Two versions coexist, that of 1965 and that of 2004, which have neither the same order nor quite the same poems. Translated by Valérie Rouzeau.
Prizes and reception
The collection that made its author a major figure of English-language poetry, praised from its publication.
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