Ariel
As Sylvia Plath herself predicted, I am writing the best poems of my life... They will make my name. Dragging herself out of a debilitating depression to look unflinchingly into her tortured soul, Plath managed to write the poems that would be published posthumously in the 1966 collection ARIEL, a work that cemented her reputation as a feminist heroine. Despite her best efforts, none of these poems were published in magazines at the time; even the New Yorker, which had a first-reading contract, turned them all down. She wrote them during the winter of 1962-63, one of the coldest in English history, shortly after separating from her husband, Ted Hughes, and while living alone with her two small children, first in an isolated Devon farmhouse and then in an underheated London flat. ARIEL contains such iconic works as Lady Lazarus, a poem filled with terrifying imagery (my skin/Bright as a Nazi lampshade) and a disturbingly witty view of suicide. In the brutal, confessional Daddy, Plath mingles her anger at her dead father with her resentment of her husband's faithlessness in a poem that compares the two of them to Hitler and to a vampire drinking her blood. However, the volume also contains some of her most tender lyrics, poems to and about her infant children, including'Nick and the Candlestick and Morning Song. Plath committed suicide on February 11, 1963--an act that, along with the excellence of her last poems, ensured her fame and also a mini-industry, including numerous biographies as well as the 2003 film SYLVIA, starring Gwyneth Paltrow as the long-suffering poet. Copyright (C) Muze Inc. 2005. For personal use only. All rights reserved.
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