Blood-hot and personal: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel at 60

It is possible to open Sylvia Plath’s Ariel at almost any page and be struck by the force and the vigour of her language: the wholly original way she deploys verbs and asks us to re-examine nouns, the energy of rhythms inflected with the American surf-swell of her beloved Atlantic Ocean. “The streetlight / Splits through the rat’s tail / Pods of the laburnum at nine in the morning” (Letter in November). “The hills step off into whiteness” (Sheep in Fog). “Limbs, images, shrieks. Behind the concrete bunkers / Two lovers unstick themselves” (Berck-Plage).

These lines are not even the famous ones. “What a trash / To annihilate each decade” (Lady Lazarus). “You do not do, you do not do / Any more, black shoe” – the drumbeat, round-vowelled opening lines of Daddy. The line breaks are like handbrake turns, displaying the mastery of the driver. Buckle up: you’re going on a wild ride.

It is 60 years since Ariel was first published in the UK; the American edition, introduced by Robert Lowell, appeared the following year, in 1966. As with so much work that is transformative, it can be almost impossible to imagine ourselves back into the cultural landscape that preceded its appearance. Moby-Dick’s high modernism seems (nearly) unexceptional now; not so in 1851. The Waste Land broke open poetic form and function; what was it like to have finished T Sturge Moore’s essay The Story of Tristram and Isolt in Modern Poetry (part one, no less) in the Criterion, turn the page and find Eliot’s masterpiece?

Plath’s work can never be perceived as ordinary, though contemporary readers would have had no inkling that this comet was headed their way. It is well known – though bears a little recounting – that the book appeared posthumously, Plath having died by suicide at the age of 30 in the freezing winter of 1963. She had separated from her husband, Ted Hughes, and was living in a flat on Fitzroy Road in London with her two small children, Frieda and Nicholas. Her only collection, The Colossus, had been released in 1960 to not much notice. When she died, the Ariel manuscript was on her desk, and Hughes, her literary executor, brought it to publication.

It was only in 1981, when Plath’s Collected Poems was published – the book would win a Pulitzer prize the following year – that the extent to which Hughes had remade her manuscript became clear, reordering the poems, removing some, adding in others. This is the edition reissued by Faber & Faber to mark the anniversary; it has a preface by the poet Emily Berry. She begins her essay with a line from Plath’s poem Totem: “The world is blood-hot and personal.”

Readers have taken Plath’s work very personally indeed: although she died before second-wave feminism flourished (Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published in the United States just a week after her death), her life, as much as her work, came to symbolise the struggle for women’s liberation. And blood-hot has been some of the rage directed at her widower, for the manner in which he manipulated – that’s one way of putting it – the book that would bring her fame, for the way he behaved (or was believed to have behaved) during the course of their marriage, for his destruction of a volume of her journals (“In those days I regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival,” he wrote).

In 2004, Faber & Faber published Ariel: The Restored Edition, with a foreword by Frieda Hughes, herself a poet and artist. This selection and ordering give the text a strikingly different tone. Hughes’s Ariel ends with the “indefatigable hoof-taps” of Words; it is immediately preceded by Edge, which, as Plath’s most recent biographer, Heather Clark, wrote, “gives the uncanny impression of having been written posthumously”. The restored edition culminates with the sequence of Plath’s bee poems – drawn from her experience of keeping bees when she and Hughes were living in Devon – and ends with Wintering: “Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas / Succeed in banking their fires / To enter another year? / What will they taste of, the Christmas roses? / The bees are flying. They taste the spring.”

Both editions begin with Morning Song, written after the birth of Frieda in 1961: “Love set you going like a fat gold watch.” As Frieda writes in her introduction to the restoration: “My mother had described her Ariel manuscript as beginning with the word ‘Love’ and ending with the word ‘Spring’.” It is, undoubtedly, a more hopeful and buoyant trajectory for the book that the “official” version provides. The anniversary hardback comes clothed in its iconic first edition jacket by Berthold Wolpe – a German-Jewish refugee who created the “look” of Faber & Faber and designed 1,500 covers for the firm.

So which version should we read? “Restored” might imply damage, though Frieda, in her introduction, has no criticism of her father’s work, which was – as she sees it – always to promote and protect Plath’s reputation. When Plath died, she was still a young woman; she had published only two books, and one of them – her novel, The Bell Jar – wasn’t even published under her own name. To readers, she remains a firestorm of potential. The poet David Mason, in an interesting essay published in the Hudson Review in 2021, makes what he admits is an unlikely comparison between Plath’s work and that of Seamus Heaney – considering how the former might have been perceived had she lived the latter’s long and fortunate life. (Relatively long: Heaney was only in his 70s when he died, after all.)

The body of scholarship and what might be called archival publication around Plath is vast in comparison to her published work. We have two fat volumes of letters; we have her journals, expurgated and not; we have stacks of biographies and reams of criticism. Much of this apparatus (though by no means all) tips Plath towards darkness. But as Mason notes: “Plath was not a poet of suicide any more than Homer was a poet of sailing.”

We cannot know how the story was meant to go, whether her death was truly intentional or not, whether she might have reworked her manuscript yet again, had she lived. As Ted Hughes wrote movingly in his poem Last Letter: “What happened that night, inside your hours, / Is as unknown as if it never happened.” The same is true, I would argue, for all of her life, for any life. I am a biographer myself, but I believe that it is, finally, an impossible genre. This is also its fascination. Who among us has not posted a letter, sent an email or a text, written a diary entry – and then changed our minds? The fixed self is a chimera.

But poetry – poetry is true, and Ariel remains some of the truest we have. The material is drawn from her own life, yes, but transcends mere biography with its radical grace and power. Berry, in her introduction to this anniversary edition, rightly lands on the force at its heart: “The blood in Ariel is redder than red, an extravagant outpouring. Blood ‘blooms’, is ‘plush’, it’s ‘a love gift’, a red carpet rolled out. It’s expensive – in Lady Lazarus, ‘a bit of blood’ commands ‘a very large charge’.” Its arterial flood is a cost and a glory.

Plath would give permission and inspiration to generations of poets who would come after her: her own place in the pantheon is secure. “I am writing the best poems of my life,” she wrote to her mother in her final, feverishly creative months. “They will make my name.”

Ariel by Sylvia Plath is published by Faber & Faber (£12.99/£18.99). Order your copy from observershop.co.uk for a 10% discount. Delivery charges may apply. Erica Wagner’s Ariel’s Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of Birthday Letters is published by Faber & Faber.

Photography by Alamy