Ariel
A poetry collection by Sylvia Plath, published posthumously in 1965. Its poems draw on compressed imagery, unstable identity, death, and renewal.
Sylvia Plath: An American poet and novelist whose work includes The Colossus, Ariel, and The Bell Jar. Plath wrote the poems that became Ariel, many during the final months of her life.
Ariel (poem): A poem by Sylvia Plath, written in 1962 and included as the title poem of Ariel. Its ride toward dawn concentrates the collection’s speed, danger, and transformation.
Confessional poetry: A mode of poetry that makes intimate personal experience, including taboo subjects, central to its material. Ariel is often read through its intensely personal speakers and subjects.
Plathian voice: A recognizable poetic voice marked by compressed language, vivid imagery, and confrontational intensity, associated with Sylvia Plath. Ariel became the collection most closely associated with this style.
Ted Hughes: An English poet who served as poet laureate and edited several posthumous collections of Sylvia Plath’s work. Hughes selected and arranged the poems for the 1965 edition of Ariel.
Lady Lazarus: A poem by Sylvia Plath in which a speaker stages survival as a recurring public spectacle. Its theatrical voice makes self-destruction and return central performances.
Modernist poetry: Poetry associated with experimentation in form, voice, and imagery amid the cultural changes of the early twentieth century. Ariel’s fractured images and abrupt shifts connect it to modernist experimentation.
Feminist literary criticism: The study of literature through questions about gender, power, authorship, and representation. Feminist readings have examined Ariel’s speakers, domestic imagery, and representations of women.
Ariel (1965 edition): The first edition of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, published in London by Faber and Faber in 1965. This edition’s sequence differs from Plath’s surviving intended arrangement.
Daddy: A poem by Sylvia Plath that addresses a father through images of oppression, rupture, and attempted escape. Its incantatory address exemplifies the collection’s charged use of personal history.