Book description
The poems in Sylvia Plath's Ariel, including many of her
best-known such as 'Lady Lazarus', 'Daddy' and 'Fever 103 degrees',
were all written between the publication in 1960 of Plath's first
book, The Colossus, and her death in 1963.
'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 in the Observer
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) 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.
