Ariel

Ariel is the second and most celebrated poetry collection by Sylvia Plath, the American poet who took her own life in London in February 1963. When she died she left a nearly finished manuscript that she had arranged with great care. However, her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, who acted as her literary executor, altered the collection: he removed some poems to avoid a sense of repetition and added others that Plath had written in the final weeks of her life. The first British edition appeared in 1965 and the American edition the following year, with an introduction by Robert Lowell. That version sparked debate, since some critics saw it as an intrusion on Plath's wishes, while others pointed out that the two poets had customarily helped each other shape their work.

The poems in Ariel break sharply with the more controlled pieces of Colossus, her first book. Their images flow freely and the psychic landscapes they describe are often menacing. Plath took on dark, taboo and deeply personal subjects in them, including illness, motherhood, death, the father and suicide, in an intense register of great formal precision. Among the best-known titles are "Daddy", "Lady Lazarus" and "Morning Song". Plath named Robert Lowell's Life Studies and Anne Sexton, who explored similar territory, among her influences.

The reception was intense and divided. Ariel became a cult book and a touchstone for confessional poetry, though it also provoked controversy among feminists and critics over how the poet's life was read through it. In 2004 The Restored Edition appeared, recovering for the first time the selection and order Plath had intended, with a foreword by Frieda Hughes, the daughter of the couple. In 1982 the collection received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, awarded posthumously in recognition of her body of work.