Ariel: The Restored Edition

Sylvia Plath ended her life in February 1963. ‘Ariel’, a slim collection of her last poems published posthumously in 1965, was radical in its impact on Anglo-American cultural life. Al Alvarez, poetry editor of The Observer, hailed Plath as a leading exponent of a new poetry who broke with the ‘gentility principle’ of English poetry in her exploration of emotional suffering. In its 1965 version, edited by her husband Ted Hughes, ‘Ariel’ retains its terrible fascination. But the collection had an earlier incarnation in a typed manuscript found on Plath’s desk after her suicide, entitled ‘Ariel and other Poems’. Many of the poems that Plath intended to form part of the Ariel collection were excised in the Ted Hughes show more version; others were substituted. The original manuscript, edited by their daughter Frieda Hughes, was not published until 2004. The poems had been available in their entirety in ‘Collected Poems‘ since 1981 but, lumped together as they were in the collected edition, the distinctive differences between the two collections were obliterated.
Plath completed the manuscript of ‘Ariel - and other poems’ in mid-November 1962. The manuscript is dedicated to her infant children Frieda and Nicholas. It consists of 40 typewritten poems arranged in final order for publication. She would write 19 more poems before her suicide on February 11 in the following year. The ‘Ariel’ collection published by Hughes in 1965 omits 13 of the poems in Plath’s manuscript substituting 12 new poems, most of them written after Plath had completed her selection in November. These are the poems she wrote in the weeks immediately preceding her suicide. Hughes also changed the order of the poems. ‘Ariel - The Restored Edition’ presented for the first time Plath’s own version of her Ariel poems. It is introduced by Frieda Hughes in a ‘Foreword’ - invaluable for its informative clarity - and supported by a facsimile of Plath’s manuscript. It includes as well, four drafts of the poem ‘Ariel’ as she worked towards its eventual realisation, her brief descriptions of the poems in a BBC reading recorded in November 1962 and a couple of helpful bibliographic appendices.
In both versions the Ariel poems reflect the emotional turmoil of a broken marriage. Plath and Hughes separated in early October 1962 when, in response to his infidelity, she told him get out of their house. When she died, leaving the Ariel manuscript and later poems, she was ‘caught’ says Frieda Hughes, ‘in the act of revenge, in a voice that been honed and practised for years, latterly with the help of my father.’ Death canonised her and amplified her literary significance. Ted Hughes was correspondingly vilified in the flood of biographies and literary studies of their marriage, their poetry and their lives. The flood continues as Sylvia Plath is reincarnated anew as a victim of intimate partner violence and representative of the ‘#MeToo’ movement
Frieda Hughes approaches the Restored Version of the poems ‘from the purely personal perspective of its history within my family’. Their intensity and focus derive from the circumstances of their composition; 25 of the poems were written in October when her parents’ marriage disintegrated. Plath wrote ‘The Applicant’, a scathing denunciation of marriage on the 11th, the day when she told Hughes to go and ‘Daddy’, her famous denunciation of patriarchy, on the following day. The urgent force of the October poems is expressed in what Frieda Hughes calls the ‘Ariel voice’ that had been become more apparent since the beginning of 1962 when her son Nicholas was born. Their vocabulary of images is a calculated assault on conventions of restraint: Hiroshima and Auschwitz are invoked to express her personal suffering and resentment. In a BBC broadcast in November Plath said they were written ‘for the ear, not the eye, poems written out loud’. Most were written in the early hours of the morning before the children awakened and she had to manage alone.
In ‘Slipshod Sybils’ (1995) Germaine Greer maintained that suicide was an occupational hazard for women who wrote in the new vein of ‘confessional’ poetry of the mid to late 20th century. Berryman aside, the men who wrote of their traumatic lives died in more conventional ways. Most of the commentary on the Ted Hughes version of the Ariel poems portrays them as an extended suicide note. Plath’s friend and publisher Al Alvarez, one of the last to see her alive, took the same line, ‘death was an unavoidable risk in writing her kind of poem’. The poems read ‘as though they were written posthumously’. (‘Savage God’ 1972) The Ted Hughes version accentuates that posthumous characterisation. He eliminated earlier poems and substituted those written in the days before she ended her life. Most notably ‘Edge’, the penultimate poem in his version, which begins: ‘The woman is perfected/Her dead/Body wears the smile of accomplishment…’
The Restored Version of Plath’s ‘Ariel and other poems’ is less moribund than the Ted Hughes compilation. However satisfying aesthetically, her death by suicide was not inevitable. Among the thousands of different configurations that the crisis in her marriage might have taken there are many in which Sylvia Plath would not have tried or succeeded in ending her life. Alvarez believed she gambled on dying. Both versions of the Ariel poems begin with ‘Morning Song’, a joyful and funny celebration of Frieda’s birth: ‘Love set you going like a fat gold watch/The midwife slapped your footsoles and your bald cry/Took its place among the elements…’ Unlike the Hughes compilation however, with its inevitable procession to death, ‘Ariel and other poems‘ ends with four poems about her beehives and their promise of a new beginning. In the last of them, Wintering, the bees have survived the cold season. The bees are all women, ‘They have got rid of the men/The blunt clumsy stumblers, the boors’. And now, ‘The bees are flying. They taste the Spring’.
In another very possible world Sylvia Plath would have outlived Ariel. Frieda Hughes closes her introduction with the reflection: ‘Each poem is put in perspective by the knowledge that in time, the life and observations the poems were written about would have changed, evolved and moved on as my mother would have done.’ show less

My copy of the originally published version of Ariel has been a dear companion to me for many years, but this was my first time reading the edition put together as Sylvia intended it. I read the facsimiles of her original manuscript and it was thrilling to see it *exactly* as she'd put it together. She's my very favourite writer and one of the biggest influences on my own poetry, so it was, as always, an intense and affecting experience to read her. I hadn't written anything in a week before reading this, but I immediately wrote two poems of my own afterwards. It was also a very rough day for me emotionally, and reading such dark poems made me feel a little less alone.

I loved this version better than the one originally published by her husband, Ted Hughes. Her symbols and recurring themes stand out-- death, mausoleums, purity, whiteness, red, flowers, the moon, blackness. Rebirth. It's stunning how I feel more at one with her vision- I can appreciate experiencing her from this perspective, the way she herself chose and arranged them.. it shows her in full control of her artistry. Although Frieda explains her father's editorial decisions it is understandable that she defend him but not satisfactory. The energy- overall- feels different. Some of them hit hard. But as Sylvia always circled back to the symbolism of winter to spring- it is felt and experienced as she meant here.

The first of the books from the semester that I'm finishing over the summer.

Great intro, written by Freida Hughes (Plath's daughter), clarifying and complicating the controversy over Ted Hughes' rearrangement of Plath's poems after her death. I'd never read Plath before, though I knew she is iconic, so all of the extra material in here was new and interesting for me. I'm not a huge poetry person, especially super confessional poetry,(I like the analysis, but reading it for pleasure is a little frustrating to me), but Plath is legendary because she is so, so good at it. I loved most of these poems, though I have to be cliche and say that "Daddy" is my favorite.

Some stand-out lines:

From "Tulips": "And I am aware of my heart: it opens show more and closes/Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me."

From "Lady Lazarus": "Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air."

From "Daddy": "Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through." (I get chills here every time!!!) show less

The first of the books from the semester that I'm finishing over the summer.

Great intro, written by Freida Hughes (Plath's daughter), clarifying and complicating the controversy over Ted Hughes' rearrangement of Plath's poems after her death. I'd never read Plath before, though I knew she is iconic, so all of the extra material in here was new and interesting for me. I'm not a huge poetry person, especially super confessional poetry,(I like the analysis, but reading it for pleasure is a little frustrating to me), but Plath is legendary because she is so, so good at it. I loved most of these poems, though I have to be cliche and say that "Daddy" is my favorite.

Some stand-out lines:

From "Tulips": "And I am aware of my heart: it opens show more and closes/Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me."

From "Lady Lazarus": "Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air."

From "Daddy": "Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through." (I get chills here every time!!!) show less

The first of the books from the semester that I'm finishing over the summer.

Great intro, written by Freida Hughes (Plath's daughter), clarifying and complicating the controversy over Ted Hughes' rearrangement of Plath's poems after her death. I'd never read Plath before, though I knew she is iconic, so all of the extra material in here was new and interesting for me. I'm not a huge poetry person, especially super confessional poetry,(I like the analysis, but reading it for pleasure is a little frustrating to me), but Plath is legendary because she is so, so good at it. I loved most of these poems, though I have to be cliche and say that "Daddy" is my favorite.

Some stand-out lines:

From "Tulips": "And I am aware of my heart: it opens show more and closes/Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me."

From "Lady Lazarus": "Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air."

From "Daddy": "Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through." (I get chills here every time!!!) show less

The first of the books from the semester that I'm finishing over the summer.

Great intro, written by Freida Hughes (Plath's daughter), clarifying and complicating the controversy over Ted Hughes' rearrangement of Plath's poems after her death. I'd never read Plath before, though I knew she is iconic, so all of the extra material in here was new and interesting for me. I'm not a huge poetry person, especially super confessional poetry,(I like the analysis, but reading it for pleasure is a little frustrating to me), but Plath is legendary because she is so, so good at it. I loved most of these poems, though I have to be cliche and say that "Daddy" is my favorite.

Some stand-out lines:

From "Tulips": "And I am aware of my heart: it opens show more and closes/Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me."

From "Lady Lazarus": "Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air."

From "Daddy": "Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through." (I get chills here every time!!!) show less