Ariel
Ariel, collection of poetry by American writer Sylvia Plath, published posthumously in the United Kingdom in 1965 and welcomed as a major literary event. It was published in the United States in 1966. Most of the poems were written during the last five months of Plath’s life, which ended by suicide in 1963. With this volume she attained what amounted to cult status for her cool, unflinching portrayal of mental anguish. Although the poems range in subject from pastoral chores (“The Bee Meeting”) to medical trauma (“Tulips”), each contributes to an impression of the inevitability of the author’s self-destruction. However, this interpretation began to be challenged after the release in 2004 of a new edition of Ariel that restored Plath’s original poetic sequence, which had been altered by Plath’s estranged husband, English poet Ted Hughes. The volume contains “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus,” two of Plath’s best-known poems.
Background
Plath considered several titles for her second collection, including The Rival, A Birthday Present, and Daddy, before choosing Ariel. This title was partly inspired by Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, in which an “airy spirit” named Ariel, who has been imprisoned by the sorceress Sycorax, is released by the magician Prospero. Ariel was also the name of a beloved horse that Plath used to ride at a school in Dartmoor, England.
Ariel is Plath’s second collection, following The Colossus (1960). Although her first collection received warm reviews, it does not represent a poet at the height of her powers. With Ariel, Plath’s gifts came into full fruition. In a letter to her mother in the fall of 1962, she wrote, “I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.”
The traditional narrative of Ariel is that it reflects a poet who was experiencing an inescapable downward spiral. Indeed, in Robert Lowell’s introduction to the first U.S. edition of Ariel, he proclaimed (with a degree of notoriety), “These poems are playing Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder, a game of ‘chicken,’ the wheels of both cars locked and unable to swerve.”
Several aspects of Plath’s final years bear out this interpretation. She wrote the bulk of Ariel’s poems after her marriage to Hughes had crumbled. They had met in 1956 while Plath was studying at the University of Cambridge, from which Hughes had graduated in 1954 and remained active in the university’s literary circle. Plath and Hughes married that same year. The couple had two children before separating in 1962, the reason being Hughes’s infidelity. In December that year, Plath moved with their children from the family’s cottage in Devon to an apartment in London, where they endured an exceptionally cold winter. Meanwhile, she composed a succession of poems in an intense burst of productivity.
In January 1963 Plath’s autobiographical novel The Bell Jar was published. Detailing her past experience with severe depression and her suicide attempt and subsequent psychiatric hospitalization, the novel was initially released under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. Less than one month after its publication, Plath took her own life.
Ted Hughes’s changes to Plath’s manuscript
She left behind the complete manuscript of Ariel in her London apartment along with several other new poems. Hughes took on the role of executor of Plath’s work, and he rearranged the poems in her manuscript and excised a number of “weaker” pieces. His changes are important for what the different poetic sequences reveal about Plath and about the relationship of two of the most prominent poets of the mid-20th century. Some scholars also believe that Hughes’s changes influenced the public’s perceptions of Plath after her suicide.
Although many of the poems in Ariel address the author’s mental anguish, a key difference between Plath’s poetic sequence and Hughes’s is that Plath’s ends on a note of hope. As Hughes explains in the introduction of The Collected Poems, a selection of Plath’s work that he edited and published in 1981:
Some time around Christmas 1962, she gathered most of what are now known as the ‘Ariel’ poems in a black spring binder, and arranged them in a careful sequence. (At the time, she pointed out that it began with the word ‘Love’ and ended with the word ‘Spring’.…)
Indeed, the collection’s original opening poem (which Hughes retained), “Morning Song,” begins with the line “Love set you going like a fat gold watch.” Plath’s manuscript ended with a sequence of “bee poems.” In 2014 Katie Kilkenny wrote in The Atlantic, “The bee poems portray the poet briefly freed from her bell jar, her eye of the tornado. It chronicles a few months in which the poet takes care of a hive, nurturing its residents in spite of their proclivity to sting and swarm her, and collects their honey in winter. It shows Plath at her most grounded, her concerns about the well being of the bees and her unshielded skin a welcome relief from her more existentially preoccupied verse.” Kilkenny also notes that Plath’s entomologist father, Otto Plath, was an expert on bumblebees, making for a personal connection between poet and subject matter that went deeper than metaphor. As well, Plath experimented with beekeeping while living in Devon. The last poem in Plath’s version of Ariel is “Wintering,” which completes the collection with the lines:
What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?
The bees are flying. They taste the spring.
Hughes shifted the bee poems to the middle of the volume, and with his rearrangement Ariel finishes with “Edge” and “Words,” two poems that starkly address death.
In the introduction to The Collected Poems, Hughes explained that he omitted from Ariel “some of the more personally aggressive poems from 1962, and might have omitted one or two more if she had not already published them herself in magazines—so that by 1965 they were widely known.” He further noted that his changes to Plath’s manuscript were a “compromise between publishing a large bulk of her work—including much of the post-Colossus but pre-Ariel verse—and introducing her late work more cautiously” and that he had been advised that “the violent contradictory feelings expressed in those [late] pieces might prove hard for the reading public to take.”
Famous poems: “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus”
The collection’s best-known poem is indeed one of “violent contradictory feelings.” In “Daddy,” Plath addresses her bitter, conflicted relationship with her father, who died when Plath was a child: “I was ten when they buried you. / At twenty I tried to die / And get back, back, back to you.” Some lines of the poem speak to Plath’s marriage to Hughes.
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
“Daddy” also makes ironic (and controversial) reference to the Holocaust to convey the speaker’s sense of suffering. Lines such as “Every woman adores a Fascist” have been interpreted by some feminist critics as Plath’s bleak and honest confrontation of societal patriarchy and internalized misogyny. For a full discussion of this poem, see Daddy.
“Lady Lazarus,” a rage-filled yet witty examination of self-destruction and resurrection written in rhyming tercets, is another of Ariel’s most famous pieces.
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
Its title refers to the biblical Lazarus, who had been miraculously brought back to life by Jesus. Other themes that are treated in Ariel include motherhood, identity, and loneliness. The collection’s title poem is an ambiguous examination of death, resurrection, and patriarchy. However, as Benjamin Voigt noted in a 2015 essay in Poetry, its use of a racial slur “underlines feminism’s historical problems with race.”
Reception
Ariel was released to great acclaim in 1965, with much attention paid to the poems’ themes of death and despair, the intensity of Plath’s language and imagery, and Plath’s apparent precarious mental health. In Book Week Irving Feldman wrote, “Glamorous with misery (hers and ours), enclosed in the circle where she is both murderer and victim, Sylvia Plath looms up as our infirm prophet.” In The New York Times Thomas Lask observed, “There is a finality to these poems, a summing up that is usually reserved as a last testament.”
Ariel became a hallmark of confessional poetry, a literary movement of the mid-20th century characterized by lyric language combined with piercing personal autobiography. (Lowell, who wrote the introduction for the collection’s American edition, was one of the foremost poets of the confessional style, and Plath had been his student in a creative writing seminar at Boston University in 1959.) Ariel was also an important text of the women’s movement that arose in the late 1960s and ’70s.
Restored edition and legacy
“I kept telling myself I was the sort that could only write when peaceful at heart, but that is not so, the muse has come to live here, now Ted is gone.”—Sylvia Plath, in a letter to Ruth Fainlight, October 1962
Plath’s original poetic sequence was published in a restored edition of Ariel released in 2004, which included poems that had been excised (such as “The Rabbit Catcher” and “The Jailor”) and featured a foreword by Frieda Hughes, Plath and Ted Hughes’s daughter. (Several of the excised poems had also been published in Winter Trees, released in 1971.) Of her mother’s intended ordering of the collection’s poems, Frieda Hughes wrote, “It was clearly geared to cover the ground from just before the breakup of the marriage to the resolution of a new life, with all the agonies and furies in between.”
Some fans and scholars of Plath’s work have expressed harsh criticism of Hughes, blaming him for his stormy relationship with Plath and for her suicide. Indeed, the poems in Ariel are often held up as evidence of his alleged cruelty. When it was revealed that Plath’s original sequencing of Ariel had been rearranged and some poems excised, Hughes received further condemnation. (He was also condemned when he revealed that immediately after her death he had destroyed one of Plath’s journals covering her final days, albeit with the desire to protect their children. Further, several letters written by Plath to her psychiatrist during the last months of her life claim abuse by Hughes.)
However, some critics contend that Hughes understood Plath’s work better than any other reader or editor and that his changes made the collection stronger. In a 2004 article in Slate, Meghan O’Rourke argued that Hughes “simply curated the poems as they invited him to curate them, with a poet’s feel for the building implications of the interwoven imagery.” She also noted that Ariel, with its incendiary contents and taboo themes, had trouble finding a publisher at first, a problem resolved by Hughes’s curation: “It is surely an emotionally complicated task to spend two years carefully reorganizing the work of your dead wife so as to persuade someone to publish a book that will implicate you in her tragic fate.”
Decades after its publication, Ariel is still considered an important work of poetry. In 2016 The Guardian included Ariel as number 17 on a list of 100 best nonfiction books of all time.