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Summary: Haunting Poetry
Review: I first encountered one of Sylvia Plath's poems in my English course at college. I became engaged and decided to buy this book. I wasn't dissapointed. Although I don't like all of the poems, there are some that are really haunting. She always put forth what she though, which is really admirable. They are easy to read. My favorites are:"Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus".
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Summary: Lady Lazarus : Plath rises from the ashes
Review: I first read Ariel at the age of 13, when the anger and blackness was a perfect outlet for my teenage angst. I memorised the vicious but gorgeous poems Lady Lazarus and Daddy and walked around holding these words as a kind of talisman against all of the nameless terror of growing up. Twenty years later, long since past the angst of my youth, I thought it would be fun to revisit this poetry which was so important to my generation, thinking perhaps I had outgrown it. However, like Lazarus, Plath rises from the ashes of her own depression to reveal a linguistic beauty which is, at times, astonishing. There is, of course, terrible bleakness. In Death & Co, for example, "I do not stir. The frost makes a flower, The dew makes a star, The dead bell. The dead bell. Somebody's done for." still leaves me shivering and feeling terribly cold and alone. Lady Lazarus, Cut and Getting There come to mind immediately as touching the very edge of death. However, there were also some light and lovely surprises, as with Morning Song, where the wonder at the miracle of a child hit a familiar note with me (having had my first child recently), in the moment the child wakes and its "clear vowels rise like balloons". It has been a long time since I've read poetry of such power, anguish or beauty. Often hard and painful, with moments of vulnerability, tenderness and even a strange kind of joy, there is something timeless and permanent in this work. Worth a re-read.
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Summary: Sylvia Plath gets you to feel and think about every emotion
Review: I just recieved Ariel as a gift by a new friend and was introduced to Syliva Plath and her inner world at the same time. There are some poets who greatly influence others and I am one of those who is influenced By Sylvia Plath in Ariel.She and I share a great many issues and the way she writes so abashedly about her emotions and relationships such as with her father who dies years before her made me pause,think and my eyes fill with the water of emotions. This is the writing of a woman who greatly and desperately wanted the world to know and see her but not by its clouded and confused perspection of her but as she actuially was.a person who simply wanted to project her heart in the world and have it accepted. Every minute detail of life she has filled with emotions in these poems, for she knew well that every experience has an emotional impact on human beings. If you want to think and feel very intensely for the first time or in one of very few times then this book and these poems are for you.
Rating:
Summary: brilliant, human & beyond human
Review: I knew about this book for a long time before I read it, because I knew it's a classic but I had no idea how truly amazingly brilliant unique & visionary a poetic work this is. Her music here is completely melodious & unfaltering. Her metaphors are staggeringly incisive. Her themes & subjects are so expansive, so complex! Someone once told me she didn't like Sylvia Plath since Sylvia Plath was just a victim of herself, but that's not the reason for her fame, just another facet of the intensity of her mind. This book is absolutely incredible poetry.
Rating:
Summary: brilliant, human & beyond human
Review: I knew about this book for a long time before I read it, because I knew it's a classic but I had no idea how truly amazingly brilliant unique & visionary a poetic work this is. Her music here is completely melodious & unfaltering. Her metaphors are staggeringly incisive. Her themes & subjects are so expansive, so complex! Someone once told me she didn't like Sylvia Plath since Sylvia Plath was just a victim of herself, but that's not the reason for her fame, just another facet of the intensity of her mind. This book is absolutely incredible poetry.
Rating:
Summary: A good place to wallow in depression
Review: I will go out on a limb here and say that most of us understand a little about depression. We understand that it is a disease, like cancer or AIDS or the common cold, and we understand that modern medicine can treat this disease, so that the the depressive, like the diabetic, can live a normal life. Untreated, depression can become worse, or may go into remission on its own, much as any other disease. Ariel is an exploration of depression before it was a disease, and before it was treatable. Like tuberculosis, depression defined a generation of writers: Lowell, Berryman, Jarrell, Roethke. It was fashionable to be an eccentric poet, to be mad. Plath does not hold it a fashion, though. Ariel is about how bad she feels, because depression is about feeling bad. That seems simplistic; imagine the worst you've ever felt, then imagine that feeling getting worse, through days, weeks, months, years. Everything one says to you is a blow, everything you value, love, trust becomes meaningless. Nothing is important enough to get you out of bed in the morning. Yet, the irony is that feeling was not appropriate to poetry of this time. Emotion had to be objectified, displaced. Eliot, Pound and the modernists left this legacy to Sylvia Plath and her generation; they took up the restriction, and created poetry that is more painful for being more objective. The depth of despair permeates Ariel, but Plath does not allow it to come to the surface. She does not moan at us, or wallow in jealousy. Instead, she creates a figure like Lady Lazarus, who personifies this jealousy and rage. In Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel warns against believing depression leads to some kind of intense creativity. Most of the time, people who are depressed cannot do anything. Ariel is a moment when Sylvia Plath could write, and she took full advantage of it, knowing that it would not last.
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Summary: truly a wonderful collection of emtionally drenched poems
Review: i write poetry myself, and i thought i was the only one who wrote in a manner of choatic freedom at times, and calm observation of life at others. yet once i read sylvia plath i realized i would never write with the fierce intensity that she did. i had never read her before, until one day i was going through a collection of poems and read "daddy." i was hooked from the first stanza. i immediately bought this book and have read it five times over since. i can't get enough. it was wonderful to know someone out there touched a part of me. but this book seems to do that to you. it conveys a sense of fear at times, and anger, love, hate, betrayel, acceptance, and sometimes just depression at others. i know the expression is overused but it really does touch you, and leaves you haunted afterwards. a must have for anyone with any true emotions or a soul.
Rating: 
Summary: mediocre ripoff
Review: In looking through this book, it was not what I thought it would be. While this review is not a crit against the greatness of Plath and her work, to have first the version of Ariel we all know, and then have it followed by her typed pages in her order just isn't worth the price. I guess I was misled into believing it would be all the poems she intended to go into Ariel, as well as those poem drafts. However, the only drafts in this mss are for "Ariel" the poem, and on of the bee poems. I enjoy reading the drafts of poets' work, simply to get the thought process of what went into it. But this book isn't worth the full price, nor does it provide any insight into her drafts, save two poems mentioned. And the intro by her daughter is a big so what? Anyone wanting to read Plath's version of Ariel need only read the poems listed in the back of her COLLECTED. Other than just the typed drafts with an occasional scribble here or there, I see little need for this book and only more opporutunity for publishers to cash in on her fame by the die-hard Plath fans.
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Summary: A Mythos of Death
Review: It may seem like an exaggeration, but I think Ariel really is all about death and its various aspects: physical, emotional, spiritual. The poems are written in a broad, mythic sense that is larger than the author, as if she is speaking from a collective conciousness. They are also poems that can evolve with the reader; they can be outlets for angst or bitterness, they can be read for their viewpoints (such as the title poem, where the speaker seems to be a disembodied spirit) or a facinating and somewhat horrifying portrait of a woman on the brink of suicide. They show the beauty in the darkness of things, and, in my opinion, belong on every poet or poetry-lover's bookshelf.
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Summary: "Love set you going," she wrote, "like a fat gold watch."
Review: Now at long last, we get the "Ariel" we deserve. Plath's admirers have been waiting a long time, since at least the early 1980s when Ted Hughes first revealed that he had changed the order of the poems in his wife's final manuscript. He had added some poems--the final, freezingly depressing ones--and then re-arranaged the bulk of the book to leave an impression of a woman gone over the brink into a chilling fugue state. Now Frieda Hughes, Plath's daughter, 2 when her mother killed herself, has performed a ritual act of atonement to her mother's memory, and given us the original, "happy" (relatively speaking) ARIEL which we have never been able to see.
At $24,95, the book's a little expensive, but it feels as though money had been spent on its planning and execution, so you don't feel rooked. In one section, the gray paper on which the facsimile materials are printed is easy on the eyes, aiding the eye as it struggles with Plath's numerous emendations. We get the notes Plath wrote for her own use when she had to do that reading at the BBC towards the end, the more-British-than-thou reading we have grown to love and hate at the same time. Frieda Hughes contributes an interesting and contextualizing introduction in which she seeks to reconcile the differing viewpoints of her mother and father--a challenging task, but she's up to it. The book ends up with four of the bee-keeping poems--and another in the appendix, "The Swarm," which Sylvia kept changing her mind about including. Should she leave it in? Take it out? The title is in brackets. Thus the book ends with a hopeful note, with the freshness of Devon instead of the bleak London winter. It ends, pleasantly enough, with the words, "They taste the spring."
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