Ariel

Synopsis

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 Observer

Author

Described by Joyce Carol Oates as ‘one of the most celebrated and controversial of postwar poets writing in English’, American writer Sylvia Plath is one of the most widely recognised, culturally significant and influential voices of the twentieth century. Her works include the poetry collections The Colossus and Ariel and the novel The Bell Jar.