Sylvia Plath killed herself in February, 1963. In the months previous, her writer’s block had vanished with a ferocity that frightened her friends – Was this manic episode the precursor to some huge crash? In those last months before she died, she wrote sometimes 3 poems a day. And these weren’t crappy poems, these were arresting terrifying works – works that made her name, works that are now taught in English classes across the land. Some are sheer genius. If you read them in order (the way Ted Hughes placed them in the original version of the book Ariel<\/i> – published after her death) – you feel her marching towards that oven. You feel her, in poem after poem, dig deeper and deeper into her psychic despair. Plath, recently separated from Hughes, her husband, had their two children in her flat with her, and because of her maternal duties, the only time she had to write was at night, or in the hours before dawn. She would sit up, at 3 am, 4 am, and churn out such poems as “Daddy”, “Lady Lazarus”, “Ariel”, “Contusion”, “The Munich Mannequins” … and many many more. These are great poems. Each poem went through multiple drafts, too – so the pace at which she worked must have been extraordinary.<\/p>\n
Before she died, she collected all of these frightening poems into a binder, and left express instructions of the ORDER in which they were to appear when published. (This was explained in the Introduction to her Collected Poems, compiled by Ted Hughes). Ted Hughes, however, felt that it would be better to put them in chronological order. And so they were.<\/p>\n
And that is the version of Ariel<\/i> that was published, that was read feverishly and picked apart, that was held up as a pure work of suicidal art, etc.<\/p>\n
Hughes has suffered enough. His decision to re-order the poems has been criticized by shrill ninnies who can’t stand the man, and who hold him responsible for everything that went wrong in Sylvia’s life. They would hold him responsible for the hole in the ozone layer. Ted Hughes is evil incarnate to these cultish Plath wackos.<\/p>\n
Anyway, all of this is just a preface.<\/p>\n
Thank you, peteb, for sending me the following news – Ariel<\/i> is now being re-issued, in the order Sylvia Plath suggested. Plath liked HER order because the first word of the volume would be “love” and the last volume would be “spring”. To HER, the volume of poems was a redemptive story, a story of hope (which is hard to believe, when you read these poems all in one sitting – it’s one of the bleakest most upsetting books I have ever read) – But that’s neither here nor there. To Plath, she was hopeful that she was starting up a new and good life without Hughes, that she would be entering “spring” again.<\/p>\n
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