Product Description

Upon the publication of her posthumous volume of poetry, Ariel, in the mid-1960s, the author became a household name. Readers may be surprised to learn that the draft of Ariel left behind by her when she died in 1963 is different from the volume of poetry eventually published to worldwide acclaim. This facsimile edition restores, for the first time, the selection and arrangement of the poems as she left them at the point of her death. In addition to the facsimile pages of her manuscript, this edition also includes in facsimile the complete working drafts of the title poem 'Ariel', in order to offer a sense of her creative process, as well as notes the author made for the BBC about some of the manuscript's poems. In her insightful foreword to this volume the author's daughter explains the reasons for the differences between the previously published edition of Ariel as edited by her father, and her mother's original version published here. With this publication, the author's legacy and vision will be re-evaluated in the light of her original working draft.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #521152 in Books
• Published on: 2004-11-22
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 1 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Along with withholding (or allegedly destroying) one of Plath’s journals after her death in 1963, Plath’s husband, the late English poet laureate Ted Hughes, brought out a version of her second and final book of poems, Ariel, that differed from the manuscript she left on her desk. That edition—for which Hughes dropped 12 poems, added 12 composed a few months later, shifted the poems’ ordering and included an introduction by Robert Lowell—has become a classic. The present edition restores the 12 missing poems, drops the 12 added ones, and prints the manuscript in Plath’s own order, followed by a facsimile of the typescript Plath left, along with a foreword by Plath and Hughes’s daughter Frieda Hughes (Wooroloo), several hand- and typewritten drafts of the book’s title poem and notes by David Semanki. The original manuscript’s contents have been widely known since Hughes published them in the 1981 Collected Poems, but there is an undeniable thrill to reading Plath’s book as she left it—the lacerating "The Rabbit Catcher," left out of the Ted Hughes edition, comes third here, with its rhyme of "force" with "gorse," the flowers of which "had an efficiency, a great beauty,/ And were extravagant, like torture." As to whether this version is a better book, only time will tell. For now, despite Frieda Hughes’s repeated references to her father’s respect for Plath’s work, tally another shot in the Plath wars.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Plath and her indelible writings have been subjected to a veritable hurricane of commentary. The storm seems to be subsiding, and although it does leave devastation in its wake--the unfair vilification of poet Ted Hughes, Plath's husband, the father of their two children and the holder of the copyright to Plath's writing--it has also kept Plath's work in the public eye, and it has inspired the publication of this treasure: the original manuscript for Plath's masterpiece, Ariel. As Frieda Hughes, a poet and an artist, explains in her set-the-record-straight foreword, her mother left behind a manuscript of 40 poems ordered by a table of contents as well as around 30 more poems written in what Frieda calls the "Ariel voice." When Ted Hughes published Ariel, he replaced and rearranged poems, editorial decisions that have been harshly criticized. Now, finally, readers can see Plath's actual manuscript in this handsome facsimile, which provides a missing piece in the Plath annals and proves that there's nothing like going to the source. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

-- George Steiner, The Reporter

"It is fair to say that no group of poems since Dylam Thomas's Deaths and Entrances has had as vivid and disturbing an impact on English critics and readers as has Ariel. Sylvia Plath's poems have already passed into legend as both representative of our present tone of emotional life and unique in their implacable, harsh brilliance...These poems take tremendous risks, extending Sylvia Plath's essentially austere manner to the very limit. They are a bitter triumph, proof of the capacity of poetry to give to reality the greater permanence of the imagined. She could not return from them."