Faber published Ariel on 11 March 1965. Harper & Row published it in June 1966. Sylvia Plath ordered Ariel differently at the time of her death. Ted Hughes selected, edited, and published a collection that differed from Plath's intentions.

For nearly 20 years, few people knew that Plath left a very different order and meaning to the collection she titled Ariel. As it stood, Ariel includes about a dozen poems Plath wrote in the last weeks of her life, poems that are of a very different inspiration and tone.

Please read Lynda K Bundtzen's The Other Ariel, published December 2001, for an insightful and thorough exploration of the genesis and scandal behind Ariel.

In 2004, Faber and HarperCollins published Ariel: The restored edition. This book prints the poems as Plath intended. Both versions of Ariel are still in print.

Plath had arranged Ariel to begin with the word 'Love' in "Morning Song" and end on the word 'spring' in "Wintering". In the originally published Ariel, the book ends on the word 'life' in from the poem "Words".

The two collections do read very differently, and I strongly suggest reading Ariel the way Sylvia Plath had ordered it. You can have arguments over whether publishers would have published her book, and Ted Hughes has claimed that he had to re-order it to get it published, but one will never know. The poems, read as a collection or individually, are phenomenal for everything from wit to cadence to subject.

The reviews of Ariel were all quite positive. Readers likely felt stunned at the poetic development Plath exhibited from her first collection, The Colossus to her second. That Plath had died shortly after writing the poems was common knowledge; their immediacy was therefore all the more powerful.

The British edition contained: Morning Song, The Couriers, Sheep in Fog, The Applicant, Lady Lazarus, Tulips, Cut, Elm, The Night Dances, Poppies in October, Berck-Plage, Ariel, Death & Co., Nick and the Candlestick, Gulliver, Getting There, Medusa, The Moon and the Yew Tree, A Birthday Present, Letter in November, The Rival, Daddy , You're, Fever 103°, The Bee Meeting, The Arrival of the Bee Box, Stings, Wintering, The Hanging Man, Little Fugue, Years, The Munich Mannequins, Totem, Paralytic, Balloons, Poppies in July, Kindness, Contusion, Edge, and Words.

The American edition featured a similar table of contents, but with the addition of "The Swarm", "Mary's Song", "Lesbos", and an introduction by the poet Robert Lowell.

Poems copyrighted to Faber & Faber (UK) & HarperCollins (US).


A selection of reviews of Ariel

"Along the Edge." Times Literary Supplement. November 25, 1965: 1071.

Alvarez, A. "Poetry in Extremis." The Observer. March 12, 1965: 26.

Baro, Gene. "Varied Quintet." New York Times Book Review. June 26, 1966: 10, 12.

Bewley, Marius. Hudson Review. Autumn 1966: 479-93.

"The Blood Jet is Poetry." Time. June 10, 1966: 118-20.

Brinnin, John Malcolm. "Plath, Jarrell, Kinnell, Smith." Partisan Review. Winter 1967: 156-60.

Burke, Herbert C. Library Journal. June 1, 1966: 118-20.

Dale, Peter. "O Honey bees come build". Agenda. Summer 1966: 49-55.

Davis, Douglas M. "In the flow of poetry, the ladies flourish." National Observer. February 6,
      1967: 31.

Davison, Peter. "Inhabited by a cry: the last poetry of Sylvia Plath." Atlantic Monthly. August
     1966: 76-7.

Drake, Barbara. "Perfection is terrible; it cannot have children." Northwest Review. Summer 1967:
     101-3.

Feldman, Irving. "The Religion of one." Book Week. June 19, 1966: 3.

Friedberg, Martha. "With feeling and color." Chicago Tribune. June 26, 1966: 6.

Furbank, P N. "New Poetry." Listener. March 11, 1965: 379.

Hope, Francis. "Suffer and observe." New Statesman. April 30, 1965.

Horder, John. "Ariel: Sylvia Plath." Outposts. Autumn 1965: 24-5.

Howes, Barbara. "A note on Ariel." Massachusetts Review. Winter 1967: 225-6.

Hughes, Ted. "Ariel." Poetry Book Society Bulletin. Spring 1965.

Jaffe, Dan. "An All-American Muse." Saturday Review. October 15, 1966: 29-31.

Johnson, B. S. "Measure, Chaos, and Indifference." Ambit. 1965: 45-6.

Kell, Richard. "The Foil of Despair." The Guardian. March 12, 1965: 9.

Kenner, Hugh. "Arts and the age on Ariel." Triumph. September 1966: 33-4.

Kenny, Herbert A. "Sylvia Plath's "Ariel" Triumph over Tragedy." Boston Globe. May 29, 1966:
      A-38.

Lask, Thomas. "A Kind of Heroism." New York Times. June 8, 1966: 45.

Maddocks, Melvin. "Sylvia Plath: The Cult and the Poems." The Christian Science Monitor. June
     30, 1966: 13.

Morse, Samuel French. Contemporary Literature. Winter 1968: 127.

Nye, Robert. "Names for Truth." The Birmingham Post. 1965.

Oettle, Pamela. "Sylvia Plath's Last Poems." Balcony/The Sydney Review. Spring 1965: 47-50.

Parker, Derek. "Ariel Indeed." Poetry Review. Summer 1965: 118-20.

"Poems for the Good-Hearted." The Times of London November 4, 1965: 15.

Press, John. "Two poets." Punch. March 31, 1965: 486.

Rosenthal, M. L. "Poets of the dangerous way." Spectator. March 1965: 367.

Ross, Alan. "Ariel by Sylvia Plath (Faber. 12s. 6d.)." The London Magazine. May 1965: 99-101.

Sealy, Douglas. Dublin Magazine. Summer 1966: 92-3.

Sergeant, Howard. English. Spring 1966: 30-2.

Skelton, Robin. "Brittania's Muse Revisited." Massachusetts Review. Autumn 1965: 834-5.

Smith, William Jay. Harper's Magazine. August 1966: 92.

Steiner, George(?). "Russian Roulette." Newsweek. June 20, 1966: 110.

Spender, Stephen. "Warnings from the grave." New Republic. June 18, 1966: 23-6.

Stephens, Alan. Denver Quarterly. Winter 1967: 101-12.

Stilwell, Robert L. "The multiplying entities: D. H. Lawrence and five other poets." Sewanee
     Review. Summer 1968: 520-35.

Taylor, Eleanor Ross. "Sylvia Plath's Last Poems." Poetry. January 1967: 582-96.

Tillinghast, Richard. "Worlds of their own." Southern Review. Spring 1969: 582-96.

© 1998-2008, Peter K. Steinberg