 Book Description
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.
Sylvia Plath churned out her final poems at the remarkable rate of two or three a day, and Robert Lowell describes them as written by "hardly a person at all ... but one of those super-real, hypnotic, great classical heroines." Even more remarkable, she wrote them during one of the coldest, snowiest winters (1962-63) Londoners have ever known. Snowbound, without central heating, she and her two children spent much of their time sniffling, coughing, or running temperatures (In "Fever 103°" she writes, "I have been flickering, off, on, off on. / The sheets grow heavy as a lecher's kiss."). Pipes froze, lights failed, and candles were unobtainable. As if these physical privations weren't enough, Plath was out in the cold in another sense--her husband, Ted Hughes, had left her for another woman earlier that year. Despite all this (or perhaps because of it), the Ariel poems dazzle with their lyricism, their surprising and vivid imagery, and their wit. Rather than confining herself to her bleak surroundings, Plath draws from a wide array of experience. In "Berck-Plage," for instance, clouds are "electrifyingly-coloured sherbets, scooped from the freeze." In "The Night Dances," the poet stands crib-side, reveling in her son's own brand of do-si-do: "Such pure leaps and spirals--Surely they travel / The world forever, I shall not entirely / Sit emptied of beauties, the gift / Of your small breath..." Though at times they present the reader with hopelessness laid bare, these poems also teem with the brightest shards of a life, confounding those who merely look for the words of a gloomy, dispassionate suicide. Plath rose each morning in the final months of her life to "that still blue, almost eternal hour before the baby's cry" and left us these words like "axes/After whose stroke the wood rings..."
"In these poems...Sylvia Plath becomes herself, becomes something imaginary, newly, wildly and subtly created."
-- From the Introduction by Robert Lowell
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