IT IS not at all unusual for an editor to tamper with a writer's manuscript. Where would F. Scott Fitzgerald have been without the scrupulous assistance of Maxwell Perkins? In 1921 Ezra Pound's slash-and-burn approach to the editing of a long poem, "The...

Monarch Notes 01-01-1963 "Ariel": A Textual Analysis Ariel was the climax of Sylvia Plath's career, the volume of poetry in which her artistry reached fruition. Written during the last weeks of her life, these poems have been described as a "triumphant surge of affirmative...

Planning a June wedding? Not finding yourself or your ideal wedding represented in the pages of Modern Bride? Are you finding yourself pushed into traditional gender roles? Could be you are having a "bridentity crisis." Seattle-based writer Ariel Meadow Stallings found herself facing such dilemmas...

Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement, by Sylvia Plath, with an introduction by Frieda Hughes. HarperCollins, 211 pages, $24.95. On the morning of Feb. 11, 1963, in the alleyway behind 23 Fitzroy Road in snowbound London,...

In the following essay, Wagner draws attention to the complexity of Plath's poetry in Ariel which, as the critic notes, invokes archetypal imagery and the paradoxical portrayal of suffering as survival to create depth of feeling and insight.

Reading The Colossus and Ariel … on the assumption, perhaps perverse but useful for analysis, that the poetry has nothing to do with the suicide and must be approached like other poetry as a tissue of language, there remains the startling phenomenon of a poet finding her own voice in the space of a very few years, through an almost complete reversal of stylistic direction…. I want to suggest, first, that the poetic strength of Ariel lies in its fusion of personal voice with national voice in a...

In [the poems collected in "Crossing the Water"] written between 1960 and late 1961 and antedating "Ariel," the poet plays Pygmalion to her own Galatea, willing herself into shape, struggling against the inherited outlines of her predecessors…. What exhausting costumes these were, and how heavy, and how distasteful to Sylvia Plath's soul we can only judge from her persistent attempts to shed these skins, and finally, in "Ariel" and some later poems, to...