There is a pervasive impatience, a positive urgency to the poems [in Ariel]…. This makes for speed and excitement as you read, but on subsequent readings of many you wish there had been time for distilling and perfecting….

The staging throughout—the one-word questions, exclamations, excesses, three-word repetitions, and determined emphasis on woman's special experience—are self-consciously womanly, yet there is a curious underlying rejection of being a woman. In spite of the poems' ostensible candor and display of all innards … there is a preoccupation with blood and bleeding…. There is a straining towards purity and virginity…. (p. 260)

These are poems bursting with self, and, unlike the comparative classicism of her first book, highly romantic in their lack of reserve, in their adoration of the suffering, the wounds, the ignominy. Tulips is the raw psychological stuff of poetry, touching, but not yet fashioned into a work of art...