Ariel by Sylvia Plath

Ariel by Sylvia Plath

'I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.'

It is sixty years since Ariel was first published. The poems were written in an extraordinary burst of creativity just before Sylvia Plath's death in 1963, and they went on to establish her reputation as one of the most original and gifted poets of the twentieth century.

The critic Al Alvarez, reviewing the collection in the Observer, wrote: '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.'

The poet Emily Berry offers an introduction that gives readers, old and new, a way into the poems, and demonstrates Plath's profound and enduring influence down the generations.

Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1932. She graduated from Smith College in 1955 and went on a Fulbright scholarship to Cambridge University, where she met and later married Ted Hughes. In her lifetime she published one novel, The Bell Jar (1963), and one volume of poetry, The Colossus (1960).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780571394777
ISBN 10	0571394779
Title	Ariel
Author	Sylvia Plath
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Faber & Faber
Year published	2025-07-03
Number of pages	104
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.