Ariel

(Hardback, Main - Re-issue)

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It is sixty years since Ariel was first published. This heritage edition restores Berthold Wolpe's iconic jacket and reproduces the original distinctive typesetting in celebration of the enduring importance of a collection that contains many of Sylvia Plath's best-known poems.

Written in an extraordinary burst of creativity just before her death in 1963, the poems are as expressive of joy as they are of desolation. The remarkable combination of artistry and intensity that was recognised on this volume's first publication established Plath as one of the most original and gifted poets of the twentieth century.

'If the poems are despairing, vengeful and destructive, they are at the same time tender, open to things, and also unusually clever, sardonic, hardminded. . . They are works of great artistic purity and, despite all the nihilism, great generosity. . . the book is a major literary event.' A. Alvarez, Observer

Author Bio

Sylvia Plath (1932-63) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and studied at Smith College. In 1955 she went to Cambridge University on a Fulbright scholarship, where she met and later married Ted Hughes. She published one collection of poems in her lifetime, The Colossus (1960), and a novel, The Bell Jar (1963). Her Collected Poems, which contains her poetry written from 1956 until her death, was published in 1981 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.