Ariel

Ariel is Sylvia Plath's second collection of poetry, published in 1965, two years after her death by suicide at age thirty. Most of the poems were written at extraordinary speed in the final months of 1962 and early 1963, during her separation from Ted Hughes and a bitterly cold London winter.

The collection is built around a handful of ferocious, formally inventive poems that reckon with death, rebirth, and rage. "Daddy" recasts Plath's grief for her deceased father as an act of exorcism, layering personal loss with the imagery of the Holocaust. "Lady Lazarus" turns suicide and survival into a dark, vaudevillian performance, its speaker rising again and again from her own ashes. The title poem, "Ariel," named for the horse Plath rode, is a breathless dawn ride toward dissolution and transformation. Poems on motherhood, bees, and the body run through the book, revealing a mind moving between clarity and collapse.

Ariel was first published in a version edited and reordered by Hughes, who also omitted several poems. A "Restored Edition," released in 2004, reinstates the sequence and selection Plath left behind at her death, closing on a note of resolve rather than despair. Widely regarded as the defining work of confessional poetry, Ariel remains one of the most influential poetry collections of the twentieth century.