Ariel (original 1965; edition 1966)

Sylvia Plath wrote with such raw energy and emotion. Her essence is on every page, in every word. Nowhere is that more plain to see than in the collected poems in Ariel. As the last collection of poetry written before her death it is riddled with references to death. That is to be expected from one suffering from depression, on the wrong kind of medicine, and already an attempted suicide survivor. It's as if death is stalking her, wooing her (case in point: the last line of "Death & Co" is "somebody is done for" (p 36) and "Dying is an art...I do it exceptionally well" (p 15). ( )

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 narrator speaks of having no fear, a fear of the unknown or a fear of loss, particularly in relation to love. There is that fast movement forward, a moving onward to the next experience and next moment in time. Many of her poems reflect this urgency to move forward and to stay in the moment — to enjoy it. Her poetry, like many have said of her own personality, burns brightly and intensely, making no excuses for rawness there — like the predawn light on the horizon not marred by expectation or perception.

Read the full review: http://savvyverseandwit.com/2013/04/ariel-by-sylvia-plath.html ( )

Another piece of literature ruined by high school AP English class and a requirement to write a paper. At 17 I was overwhelmed by Plath, by 19 I was cynical and dismissive, by 22 full of contempt. Maybe I can give it a second chance one day, but it seems like a lot of effort. ( )

Is there any book more irritating? It just gets right down under your skin like someone sharpened a bitterness stick and just wants to poke you with it over and over. (I think someone did.) Sometimes I wake up in the morning and the first thing I think is, "You do not do, you do not do any more black shoe." and then the second thing I think is, "Fuck you, Sylvia Plath." ( )

"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 worst among them, are that. In "Getting There," the motion of the train is seen as an infinite edacity: "What do wheels eat, these wheels / Fixed to their arcs like gods, / The silver leash of the will - / Inexorable." Later in the poem, we learn that the train is carrying the body of a dead woman and her funeral procession. But this death - "I shall bury the wounded like pupas" - is really nothing but a transmogrifying rebirth. "And I, stepping from this skin / Of old bandages, boredoms, old faces / Step to you from the black car of Lethe, / Pure as a baby."

"Daddy," the poem with which most readers will be familiar even if they have not read the rest of the poems, begins as a threnody in memory of her father, but grows into a caustic, brooding indictment utilizing the extended poetic conceit of the Holocaust. In this poem, Plato deals with the betrayal of her father by constructing her poem around the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy. It also references "The vampire who said he was you / And drank my blood for a year, / Seven years, if you want to know" in a none-too-ambiguous reference to her relationship with her husband, fellow poet Ted Hughes.

As with many other poems in "Ariel," the effect of poetry that is so troubled and biographical - so confessional - is nothing less than revelatory, hieratic in its insistence that we should rethink ideas of violence and love. ( )