Ariel
Ratings42
Average rating3.9
15
Ratings42
Average rating3.9
The poems in Sylvia Plath's Ariel, including many of her best-known such as 'Lady Lazarus', 'Daddy', 'Edge' and 'Paralytic', were all written between the publication in 1960 of Plath's first book, The Colossus, and her death in 1963. 'If the poems are despairing, vengeful and destructive, they are at the same time tender, open to things, and also unusually clever, sardonic, hardminded . . . They are works of great artistic purity and, despite all the nihilism, great generosity . . . the book is a major literary event.' A. Alvarez in the ObserverThis beautifully designed edition forms part of a series with five other cherished poets, including Wendy Cope, Don Paterson, Philip Larkin, Simon Armitage and Alice Oswald.
Reviews with the most likes.
This is my first foray into Plath and I'm pretty much a noob with poetry in general. I'll be honest: I struggle. I wonder if I need to be in the right frame of mind, or whether should the poems drag me from the real world into a better place? I'm not sure.
It's not what I was expecting, maybe that's it. Now that I know that, I should have another go; find some lines that I get and hold onto them. There are other worlds than these.
I loved reading Sylvia Plath as a teen. I read the Bell Jar a long time ago, but I know that was just scratching the surface of her writings. I'm quite curious about her life.
As an adult, I'm no longer as emotional and full of angst. I do think that the writing is amazing, thoughtful, and emotional.
The writing is very dark and enigmatic, filled with images of the color red, animated by her desire for relief and for death. It is hard to read, hard to understand, but one can only see the high quality of her writing. I need to mention that she used racial slurs several times and loose comparisons to the Holocaust.
This collection of poems was published posthumously.
