Known primarily for her poetry, Plath also wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas.

Ariel by Sylvia Plath | Waterstones

In 1960, her first collection, Colossus, was published, and in 1963 she published her novel, The Bell Jar. Disturbing images flood the still pond of my mind, I feel faint visualizing drops of blood soaking weaved carpets of fluffy snowflakes drawing impossibly flowery forms on shimmering innocence, red tulips opening their moist petals aroused by treacherous dew at dawn, warmth bitterly frozen in morbid colors. Emma graduated from East Carolina University with a BA in English, minor in Creative Writing, BFA in Fine Art, and BA in Art Histories. So a trivial incident gathers into a whole complicated nexus of feelings about the way her life is getting out of control.This is the collection husband Ted Hughes found after Plath’s suicide and published in ‘65—it became one of the most widely read poetry books of last century. In the same interview, Plath also cited the poet Anne Sexton as an important influence on her writing during this time since Sexton was also exploring some of the same dark, taboo, personal subject matter that Plath was exploring in her writing. Her writing is so unique, so different from anything else, you can't help being drawn to it, like a moth to a flame. They need to be read aloud; they are original because she discovered in them her own speaking voice, her own identity.

Ariel (Faber Heritage Poetry Editions) by Sylvia Plath Ariel (Faber Heritage Poetry Editions) by Sylvia Plath

It has to do with her extraordinary outburst of creative energy in the months before her death, culminating in the last few weeks when, as she herself wrote, she was at work every morning between four and seven, producing two sometimes three poems a day. At one extreme she celebrates the ritual murder of her subconscious father-image in jangling staccato phrases parodying the clichés of agony column verse, and culminating in a Walpurgisnacht frenzy. It is easy to see why 'Ariel' became one of the most popular and talked about poetry collections of the twentieth century. I'm wanting to get into more poetry, but I have to classify books of poetry in two categories: poems I understood, and poems I didn't. Some poems were difficult to open, difficult to find their meaning, but that just means repeated readings might open them.So, no-one needs another review of Plath's raging, bitter, vengeful poems that batter us with image after startling, shattering image: the scarlet bloom of blood, claustrophobia and airlessness, the dissolution of the female body and voice, balanced by transcendental moments of renewal and rebirth. Throughout this book there was slur after slur, offensive or maybe just inane comparisons, and a clear prejudice towards 'unfamiliar' aspects. Another critic remarked that “her poetry would have been valuable no matter what she had written about. From what the reader has learned about the change that the narrator is undertaking, this reference to suicide is most likely to do with the killing of a past self.

Ariel by Sylvia Plath | Goodreads

Lesbos on being trapped in szyzophrenia and who you could be, if you would not be held back by baby crap. All of these are amazing poems by themselves, but reading the collection as a whole did in a way help me understand a bit more about Sylvia Plath as a person, which helps you understand her work better. In an interview after her death, Ted Hughes, Plath’s husband, explained that “ Ariel” was the name of her horse. That menace carries over into the next bit of description (of the noise) and shift, though another image, into wry helplessness (“I am not Caesar”); at which point a sense of proportion reasserts itself: “They can die … I am the am the owner.

I was five at the time, and some of my first memories are of the bitter cold, and of how incredibly deep the snow was. And it is an invitation to all of us to face the past with courage and dignity and even a little bit of arrogance. Plath had some near-death experiences in her life--an accidental near-drowning at age 10 and a suicide attempt at age 20. The speaker can see a new, intense, burning light at the end of her tunnel, and she is heading straight for it. They are difficult, uncertain poems, some extremely obscure and all primarily dependent on central images.