Ariel by Sylvia Plath

Ariel was published in 1965, two years after Sylvia Plath’s suicide at the age of 30. It dramatises her history of mental illness, her passionate and complex feelings for the dominant men in her life and her overwhelming ambition to become a great poet. The collection made her name overnight and cemented her status as the most iconic female poet of the late twentieth century. In 1982, with the appearance of her Collected Poems, Plath became the first poet to be awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize

While it is naive to view literary texts as mere adapted autobiographies, Ariel demands that the interplay between Plath’s art and psyche is explored. Like her American contemporaries Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, Plath’s work is confessional.

Her deeply self-reflexive poems use her mental anguish as both source and subject. As her husband, Ted Hughes, once put it, ‘Every work of art stems from a wound in the soul of the artist…Art is a psychological component of the auto-immune system that gives expression to the healing process. That is why great works of art make us feel good.’