Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement - Hardcover

About the Author

Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Massachusetts. Her books include the poetry collections The Colossus, Crossing the Water, Winter Trees, Ariel, and Collected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize. A complete and uncut facsimile edition of Ariel was published in 2004 with her original selection and arrangement of poems. She was married to the poet Ted Hughes, with whom she had a daughter, Frieda, and a son, Nicholas. She died in London in 1963.

From the Back Cover

Upon the publication of her posthumous volume of poetry, Ariel, in the mid-1960s, Sylvia Plath became a household name. Readers may be surprised to learn that the draft of Ariel left behind by Sylvia Plath when she died in 1963 is different from the volume of poetry eventually published to worldwide acclaim.

This facsimile edition restores, for the first time, the selection and arrangement of the poems as Sylvia Plath left them at the point of her death. In addition to the facsimile pages of Sylvia Plath’s manuscript, this edition also includes in facsimile the complete working drafts of the title poem, "Ariel," in order to offer a sense of Plath's creative process, as well as notes the author made for the BBC about some of the manuscript's poems.

In her insightful foreword to this volume, Frieda Hughes, Sylvia Plath's daughter, explains the reasons for the differences between the previously published edition of Ariel as edited by her father, Ted Hughes, and her mother's original version published here. With this publication, Sylvia Plath's legacy and vision will be re-evaluated in the light of her original working draft.

Reviews

Along with withholding (or allegedly destroying) one of Plath’s journals after her death in 1963, Plath’s husband, the late English poet laureate Ted Hughes, brought out a version of her second and final book of poems, Ariel, that differed from the manuscript she left on her desk. That edition—for which Hughes dropped 12 poems, added 12 composed a few months later, shifted the poems’ ordering and included an introduction by Robert Lowell—has become a classic. The present edition restores the 12 missing poems, drops the 12 added ones, and prints the manuscript in Plath’s own order, followed by a facsimile of the typescript Plath left, along with a foreword by Plath and Hughes’s daughter Frieda Hughes (Wooroloo), several hand- and typewritten drafts of the book’s title poem and notes by David Semanki. The original manuscript’s contents have been widely known since Hughes published them in the 1981 Collected Poems, but there is an undeniable thrill to reading Plath’s book as she left it—the lacerating "The Rabbit Catcher," left out of the Ted Hughes edition, comes third here, with its rhyme of "force" with "gorse," the flowers of which "had an efficiency, a great beauty,/ And were extravagant, like torture." As to whether this version is a better book, only time will tell. For now, despite Frieda Hughes’s repeated references to her father’s respect for Plath’s work, tally another shot in the Plath wars.
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Plath and her indelible writings have been subjected to a veritable hurricane of commentary. The storm seems to be subsiding, and although it does leave devastation in its wake--the unfair vilification of poet Ted Hughes, Plath's husband, the father of their two children and the holder of the copyright to Plath's writing--it has also kept Plath's work in the public eye, and it has inspired the publication of this treasure: the original manuscript for Plath's masterpiece, Ariel. As Frieda Hughes, a poet and an artist, explains in her set-the-record-straight foreword, her mother left behind a manuscript of 40 poems ordered by a table of contents as well as around 30 more poems written in what Frieda calls the "Ariel voice." When Ted Hughes published Ariel, he replaced and rearranged poems, editorial decisions that have been harshly criticized. Now, finally, readers can see Plath's actual manuscript in this handsome facsimile, which provides a missing piece in the Plath annals and proves that there's nothing like going to the source. Donna Seaman
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