Lynda Bundtzen:
The Other Ariel

Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in 1963 at age thirty, is now widely regarded as one of America's greatest poets. Her second collection, "Ariel," which was issued posthumously in 1965, received superb reviews and became one of the best-selling books of poetry published in the twentieth century.

What is less well known about this celebrated volume is that the poems it contains are not the ones Plath herself selected when she assembled her manuscript. With great care and critical insight, Lynda K. Bundtzen examines Plath's original typescript for "Ariel" and compares it to the version that was published by her estranged husband, Ted Hughes. In his role as Plath's literary executor and Ariel's editor, Hughes deleted twelve poems that he considered too "personally aggressive" in their attacks on him, while adding several others composed in the final weeks of Plath's life and colored by her suicidal depression.

Bundtzen argues that Plath's original plan represented a conscious response to her disintegrating marriage--the swearing off of an old life with Hughes and the creation of a new self as a woman and poet. The poems Hughes deleted show her in an angry dialogue over their marital breakup, with Plath writing several of these bitterly ironic poems on the verso of Hughes's manuscript for an unpublished play entitled "The Calm." Beneath the surface of Hughes's "calm" we see a "tempest" building by the woman who chose Shakespeare's Ariel as her poetic identity.

Also by Lynda Bundtzen:

Plath's Incarnations: Woman and the Creative Process (1983)
Winner of the Alice and Edith Hamilton Prize from University of Michigan Press