Ariel

Ariel Review

Ariel was published in 1965, two years after Sylvia Plath’s death at thirty years old. Ted Hughes, her estranged husband, made the editorial decisions about the collection — decisions that have been debated ever since, since Plath had arranged the poems differently, and the order Hughes chose ends with the bee poems rather than the final three poems Plath had placed at the collection’s close. The edition most commonly read today contains Hughes’s ordering. A restored edition published in 2004 presents Plath’s own arrangement.

None of this matters to the immediate experience of the poems, which is one of the most powerful available in twentieth-century literature. Ariel contains “Lady Lazarus,” “Daddy,” “Edge,” “Morning Song,” “Nick and the Candelstick,” and “Fever 103” — a run of poems that changed what English-language poetry could do with extreme psychological states. The question these poems pose is how to write about extremity without it becoming mere expression: how to render rage, despair, and the desire for transformation with sufficient formal control that the rendering becomes art rather than document.

Plath’s answer is technical mastery placed entirely in service of emotional truth. The sound-work in “Lady Lazarus” — the slant rhymes, the rhythm that accelerates toward the ending, the systematic violation of the reader’s comfort — is not ornamentation but the mechanism through which the poem achieves its effect. The famous final lines are inseparable from the sonic pattern that builds to them. To remove the technique would be to remove the poem.

The controversy over the Holocaust imagery in “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” — Plath’s use of Nazi metaphors to describe personal oppression — is legitimate and unresolved. Plath was not Jewish, and the metaphors represent a kind of appropriation that can be described as a failure of proportion even while acknowledging the poems’ extraordinary power. Both things are true. Ariel is a great book that contains real problems, and the best readings hold both simultaneously.

The Leap from The Colossus

Part of what makes Ariel so startling is the distance it travels from Plath’s first collection, The Colossus. Those earlier poems were accomplished but careful, dense with literary allusion and visibly worked, the product of a brilliant student of the craft. The Ariel poems, written in a furious burst in the final months of 1962 and early 1963, are something else entirely: faster, freer, and far more dangerous, with images that detonate rather than accumulate. The breakthrough came partly from method — Plath wrote many of these poems at dawn, before her children woke, in a white heat of composition — and partly from a willingness to turn the full force of her craft on her own rage, grief, and longing for transformation. The result reads less like polished verse than like something forced up from underground, yet every line remains under exacting control.

Craft in the Service of Fury

It is this combination — extremity of feeling married to absolute formal command — that makes Ariel a landmark rather than a curiosity. “Lady Lazarus,” with its sing-song menace and its accelerating slant rhymes, turns a meditation on suicide and resurrection into a performance of terrifying control. “Daddy” weaponizes nursery-rhyme rhythm against its monstrous subject, the bounciness of the meter making the content more disturbing, not less. “Edge,” likely the last poem Plath ever wrote, achieves a chilling, marmoreal calm. Across the collection the recurring images — rebirth and fire, the female body, the bees, the moon — cohere into a unified imaginative world. Plath proved that anger and despair, rendered with sufficient precision, could become a kind of terrible beauty, and in doing so she expanded what confessional poetry was allowed to do.

Whose Ariel? The Editorial Question

No account of the book is complete without its troubled publication history. Plath left behind a carefully ordered manuscript that began with the word “Love” and ended on the hopeful note of the bee sequence — a deliberate arc toward survival and rebirth. After her death, Ted Hughes, her estranged husband and literary executor, substantially reshaped it: he cut roughly a dozen poems, added around fifteen others written in her final weeks, and reordered the whole so that it closed on the bleaker poems of death. The familiar 1965 Ariel is therefore as much Hughes’s construction as Plath’s, and critics have argued for decades about how that framing nudged readers to see the collection as “one long suicide note.” The 2004 Ariel: The Restored Edition, with a foreword by the poets’ daughter Frieda Hughes, finally printed Plath’s own sequence, letting readers encounter the book she actually designed — one that ends not in the grave but in the resilient hum of the hive.

The Verdict

Ariel is one of the indispensable poetry collections of the twentieth century, a book that permanently altered the possibilities of the lyric and gave generations of poets license to write the unspeakable with discipline rather than mere abandon. Its power is inseparable from the tragedy surrounding it, and the biographical proximity to Plath’s death can distort readings; its Holocaust imagery raises real and unresolved questions of proportion. But these complications are part of what makes the book endure — it refuses easy consolation in every direction. Read it for the voice, unlike any other in English, and for the astonishing proof that the most extreme human feeling can be made into the most exacting art.

Our rating: 4.7/5 — One of the defining poetry collections of the twentieth century: a volcanic, formally flawless reckoning with rage, despair, and rebirth that changed what poetry could do.

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