Ariel

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Ariel"'s short length and seeming simplicity – a woman rides her horse through the countryside at dawn – is belied by the incredible amount of critical attention and praise that the poem has received since its publication in 1965. It is considered one of Plath's most accomplished and enigmatic poems, for it explores far more than a simple daybreak ride. It must be noted that this poem provides the title for her collection Ariel, selected after she rejected the title "Daddy." The poem justifies its centrality through a use of dazzling imagery, vivid emotional resonance, historical and biblical allusions, and a breathtaking sense of movement. Critics tend to discuss the poem as explorations of several different subjects, including: poetic creativity; sexuality; Judaism; animism; suicide and death; self-realization and self-transformation; and mysticism. Finally, in critic Marjorie Perloff's discussion of animism and angst, she claims Plath's poetry as representative of the ecstatic, oracular poetic type, which centered upon self, thereby eschewing any sort of narrative objectivity. Plath identifies with the animal kingdom to express herself, depicting humans as lifeless and cold, and animals as vibrant and alive. She wishes to lose her human identity and commit to the instinct of animal, which rids her of any objectivity or judgment. In "Ariel," she is "God's lioness" as she becomes one with her force in a vivid trance. Perloff comments that "at its most intense, life becomes death but it is a death that is desired: the 'Suicidal' leap into the 'red / Eye' of the morning sun is not only violent but ecstatic." Animism is a way to demonstrate how one is taken out of one's quotidian life and one's self to achieve a state of transcendence and communion.

The horse, Ariel, represents the speaker's own psyche and sense of self. The eye in the sky represents a sense of divine or supernatural presence. As Hughes and Plath were legally married at the time of her death, Hughes inherited the Plath estate, including all her written work. He has been condemned repeatedly for burning Plath's last journal, saying he "did not want her children to have to read it". [79] Hughes lost another journal and an unfinished novel, and instructed that a collection of Plath's papers and journals should not be released until 2013. [79] [80] He has been accused of attempting to control the estate for his own ends, although royalties from Plath's poetry were placed into a trust account for their two children, Frieda and Nicholas. [81] [82] Clark, Heather L. (2020). Red Comet: The short life and blazing art of Sylvia Plath (Firsted.). New York: Knopf. ISBN 978-0-307-96116-7. OCLC 1128061536. The poem is indeed full of sexual imagery. Some examples include: lines 5 and 6 ("How one we grow,/Pivot of heels and knees!"); line 17 ("thighs, hair"); and the imagery of the phallic arrow. All of these lend credence to the claim that "Ariel" is an erotic poem. Plath is clearly the female rider, but she identifies with the horse's masculinity. Further, when she ignores the child's cry, she is refusing to accept the traditionally female role of mother and care-giver. Shakespeare's Ariel is an androgynous figure, and Plath's "Ariel" might also be statement about how a female poet, when possessed by the poetic creative fury, is not a female anymore – the genius transcends gender. The transcendence is not a violent one, and is not aimed at destroying men, however. Instead, it lies entirely outside of gender.

Analysis

A deeply personal collection of confessional poems that are deeply concerned with issues of selfhood and identity, death, and rebirth. Morgan, Robin (1970). Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-394-45240-2. In his 1972 book on suicide, The Savage God, friend and critic Al Alvarez claimed that Plath's suicide was an unanswered cry for help, [43] and spoke, in a BBC interview in March 2000, about his failure to recognize Plath's depression, saying he regretted his inability to offer her emotional support: "I failed her on that level. I was thirty years old and stupid. What did I know about chronic clinical depression? She kind of needed someone to take care of her. And that was not something I could do." [47] Plath's grave at Heptonstall church, West Yorkshire Following Plath's death [ edit ] a stallion, as her attempt to become a masculine force [3] further supported by a diary entry from the memoir of Laurie Levy, an associate editor of Plath's at Mademoiselle, which reads "S.[ylvia] thinks Ariel--animal power, fiery depths." [7]

After Otto's death, Aurelia moved her children and her parents to 26 Elmwood Road, Wellesley, Massachusetts, in 1942. [7] Plath commented in "Ocean 1212-W", one of her final works, that her first nine years "sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle—beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth". [5] [13] Plath attended Bradford Senior High School (now Wellesley High School) in Wellesley, graduating in 1950. [5] Just after graduating from high school, she had her first national publication in the Christian Science Monitor. [10] College years and depression [ edit ] Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts Plath was clinically depressed for most of her adult life, and was treated multiple times with early versions of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). [3] She ended her own life in 1963.Some in the feminist movement saw Plath as speaking for their experience, as a "symbol of blighted female genius". [43] Writer Honor Moore describes Ariel as marking the beginning of a movement, Plath suddenly visible as "a woman on paper", certain and audacious. Moore says: "When Sylvia Plath's Ariel was published in the United States in 1966, American women noticed. Not only women who ordinarily read poems, but housewives and mothers whose ambitions had awakened ... Here was a woman, superbly trained in her craft, whose final poems uncompromisingly charted female rage, ambivalence, and grief, in a voice with which many women identified." [98] Some feminists threatened to kill Hughes in Plath's name. [43] The Colossus(1960) and the posthumous Ariel(1965) show a remarkable development. The first is a largely personal poetry, intense and delicately rendered, usually dealing with the relationship of the poet and a perceived object from which she seeks illumination, ‘that rare, random descent.’ Radical feminist poet Robin Morgan published the poem "Arraignment", in which she openly accused Hughes of the battery and murder of Plath. Her book Monster (1972) "included a piece in which a gang of Plath aficionados are imagined castrating Hughes, stuffing his penis into his mouth and then blowing out his brains". [87] [85] [88] Hughes threatened to sue Morgan. The book was withdrawn by the publisher Random House, but it remained in circulation among feminists. [89] Other feminists threatened to kill Hughes in Plath's name and pursue a conviction for murder. [43] [87] Plath's poem "The Jailor", in which the speaker condemns her husband's brutality, was included in Morgan's 1970 anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement. [90]

Sylvia Plath (born October 27, 1932, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.—died February 11, 1963, London, England) American poet whose best-known works, such as the poems “Daddy” and “ Lady Lazarus” and the novel The Bell Jar, starkly express a sense of alienation and self-destruction closely tied to her personal experiences and, by extension, the situation of women in mid-20th-century America.

Summary

Ariel is only a selection from a mass of work Plath left. Some of the other pomes have been printed here and there, some have been recorded, some exist only in manuscript. It is to be hoped that all this remaining verse will soon be published. As it is, this book is a major literary event. Strangeways, Al; Plath, Sylvia (Autumn 1996). " 'The Boot in the Face': The Problem of the Holocaust in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath" (PDF). Contemporary Literature. 37 (3): 370–390. doi: 10.2307/1208714. JSTOR 1208714. S2CID 164185549. Archived from the original (PDF) on February 12, 2020. Sylvia Plath ( / p l æ θ/; October 27, 1932– February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for two of her published collections, The Colossus and Other Poems (1960) and Ariel (1965), and also The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her suicide in 1963. The Collected Poems was published in 1981, which included previously unpublished works. For this collection Plath was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1982, making her the fourth to receive this honour posthumously. [1] Ariel" is composed of ten three-line stanzas with an additional single line at the end, and follows an unusual slanted rhyme scheme. Literary commentator William V. Davis notes a change in tone and break of the slanted rhyme scheme in the sixth stanza which marks a shift in the theme of the poem, from being literally about a horse ride, to more of a metaphoric experience of oneness with the horse and the act of riding itself. [3] Context [ edit ]