Ariel

Ariel remains essential, inspirational reading for every aspiring poet

'The world is blood-hot and personal': in her moving and illuminating introduction, the poet Emily Berry remembers her own teenage encounters with Ariel and offers a personal way into this definitive collection. She shows us how Plath can crystallize our most volatile emotions, transforming them into images so potent and precise that they resonate with us all. Plath has been an inspiration to successive generations; her influence, enduring and profound.

'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, Observer, 1965

About the Author

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).