Ariel
Ariel collects the poems Sylvia Plath wrote in a sustained creative rush during the last months of her life, before she died by suicide in 1963. The book appeared in 1965 in an arrangement chosen by her husband Ted Hughes, and a later edition restored Plath's own intended order. The poems are charged and controlled at once, taking on anger, motherhood, the body, the Holocaust, and death in lines that move fast and hit hard. Pieces such as Lady Lazarus and Daddy became some of the most quoted poems of the twentieth century. The collection helped define confessional poetry and cemented Plath's reputation as a major voice. It is intense reading, and its power comes from the precision of the language as much as from the darkness of the subjects.
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What you might want to know about Ariel
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
The fierce, late poems of Sylvia Plath, written in a burst before her death and published after it.
Plath wrote most of these poems in a burst during the final months of her life. The collection was published in 1965, two years after her death.
Ted Hughes arranged the original 1965 edition. A later restored edition follows Plath's own intended order and includes poems Hughes had left out.
Ariel was written by Sylvia Plath, published in 1965 by HarperCollins Publishers.
Ariel is 96 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Ariel takes most readers 1 to 2 hours to finish.
Ariel is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.