Rating: 
Summary: Sylvia's most revealing work
Review: There is no doubt that "Ariel" is Plath's most celeberated work. The poems were written the last months of her life (Before she put her head into an oven) They seem to written with such urgency... as if she despertely wanted to get all of the darkness inside her on paper. I am terrifyed by this dark thing
That sleeps inside me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
...ARIEL She wrote and wrote and wrote.... Sometimes three poems a day...But the devil inside continued to consume her... But it shimmers, it does not stop, and I think it wants me.
...ARIEL The reader feels her pain, her hopelessnes, her desperation, her burdened soul. A flower left out---Morning has been blackened---Starless and fatherless, a dark water---Plummet to their dark address---And the message of the yew tree is blackness, blackness and silence---If you only knew how these veils were killing me.
...ARIEL Plath's darkest hours are within these poems...the reader can feel her night breath on their skin, feel her quickening heart. Ted Hughes had left her for another woman, she was stuck in England with two small children, it was the coldest winter on record. Here's what she says about Ted.... If I've killed one man, I've killed two---
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
..ARIEL Plath's verse is gorgeous. Nobody has compared to her imagery yet...or her use of metaphor. All night your moth -breath/
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow. Smiles catch on my skin/like smiling hooks. The beads of hot metal fly, and I,love,I
am a pure accetylene. My head a moon
Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin. ...ARIEL When she was only 30, Plath put towels under the doors where her children were sleeping, so they would not inhale the fumes...
She then put her head into an oven. I often wonder why nobody could have helped her with her devil:
not her mother, friends, husband, children, her tarot cards, not even her poetry. But finally she helped herself..... Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call ....ARIEL/1960
Rating:
Summary: Breathtaking
Review: These poems are scathing and beautiful. It is not a long work, but it requires multiple readings to break into its core. A greatly UNDERrated work that should have won the Pulitzer, I think "Ariel" stands alone much stronger than her Collected Poems, which actually DID win the Pulitzer. The emotions are huge and fiery, and the language is second to none. Plath has an ear for music in language, and shows it wonderfully in "Lady Lazarus," "Daddy," "Fever 103," and "Ariel," where she rides her horse into "the red eye, the cauldren of morning." Brilliant work by a sometimes misinterpreted and mis-categorized writer. Don't read it to wallow in depression-- read it to hear a unique and truly gifted voice. Brava, Sylvia Plath! Your time came too soon.
Rating:
Summary: very good compellation of poetry...
Review: This book of poems by plath is an excellent read. i use her poetry as a springboard for poems i write and it's a wonderful help. this is a book of poems by plath that were found by her ex husband after her suicide, he edited them and compiled them to create ariel. i recommend this book to anyone serious about poetry that can handle the hardness of the reality plaths poems adress.
Rating:
Summary: Essential reading
Review: This is a book women give to other women. I keep giving my copy away, yet somehow I always end up with another one... Ariel was Sylvia Plath's horse, and like the passion of women for horses, these poems are weirdly powerful, frightening, sensual and arcane.
Rating:
Summary: Uninhibited, tragic genius
Review: This is a compilation that must be read, ideally several times in different moods and in different places. Its genius is undeniable; Plath's pain is hard to witness even 40 years after her death.
Despite the fact that Ariel isn't truly a pure collection of her last works, it is close enough so that one can watch her attachment to life ebb even as her mad genius soars out of the human realm. I particularly appreciate "Lady Lazarus" and "Elm" though there are plenty of other gems in this book. Plath's brutal honesty, her stark and terse mastery of the language, her raw and untamed emotional extremes, all coalesce into a beautiful and haunting poetry that is beyond my ability to describe in a way that does it justice. Ariel is a must-read for those with any interest in poetry, 20th century literature destined to be someday be counted among the "classics," the artist suffering from bipolar disorder or severe depression, feminist literature, or the rapid development of genius in the relatively young.
Rating:
Summary: Uninhibited, tragic genius
Review: This is a compilation that must be read, ideally several times in different moods and in different places. Its genius is undeniable; Plath's pain is hard to witness even 40 years after her death. Despite the fact that Ariel isn't truly a pure collection of her last works, it is close enough so that one can watch her attachment to life ebb even as her mad genius soars out of the human realm. I particularly appreciate "Lady Lazarus" and "Elm" though there are plenty of other gems in this book. Plath's brutal honesty, her stark and terse mastery of the language, her raw and untamed emotional extremes, all coalesce into a beautiful and haunting poetry that is beyond my ability to describe in a way that does it justice. Ariel is a must-read for those with any interest in poetry, 20th century literature destined to be someday be counted among the "classics," the artist suffering from bipolar disorder or severe depression, feminist literature, or the rapid development of genius in the relatively young. Of course, that's just my opinion.
Rating:
Summary: Pure acetylene
Review: To say that ARIEL is a stunning book of poetry does not seem adequate. Reading ARIEL is like opening a Pandora's box of strange beauties, nightmares, furies, sorrows, and surreal sweetnesses, as in "Morning Song", in which the poet whispers to her sleeping child: "All night your moth-breath/Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:/A far sea moves in my ear." Unlike Pandora's box, there is no hope at the end of Ariel, only "fixed stars" and the moon "staring from her hood of bone". In ARIEL, Plath seemed to almost shamanistically reach into realities just beneath the surface of everyday life, hauling them to consciousness with a skill almost unequaled in contemporary poetry. ARIEL stands as an unrivaled poetic achievement, written in a mesmerising and indelibly haunting voice.
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