"I / Have a self to recover": the restored Ariel

Literary Review, Summer, 2005 by Lee Upton

Most of the poems that follow in Hughes's edited version were among the nineteen left in a stack next to Plath's manuscript of Ariel. Written in the last weeks of her life, they are marked by an abstract, chilling certainty. By sealing off Plath's original ending and concluding the book with some of her most despairing poems, Hughes extended the emotional tenor of the manuscript toward despair and a haunting inevitability. The result is that the first published Ariel is a more dramatic manuscript, its ending mirroring the tragedy of Plath's final decision about her own life. As a work of art it is more powerful than Plath's original manuscript by virtue of its inherent drama (which is separate from its author's fate) and its tonal richness. By incorporating the glacial final poems with their undiluted, uncompromising austerity, Hughes gave us an extended view of Plath's range as a poet.

The differences between the two versions become all the more resonant if read alongside Robert Lowell's famous foreword to the first published U. S. edition, which renders Plath as "hardly a person at all, or a woman, certainly not another 'poetess.'" For Lowell, Plath is one of the "great classical heroines" and, then, in a sudden descent down the chain of being, no less than a racehorse, and soon enough something like a machine with "her hand of metal with its modest, womanish touch." From the distance of the 21st century, Lowell's remarks seem like a dazzling fantasia on nihilism as he argues that the poems "tell that life, even when disciplined, is simply not worth it." The restored edition, with its narrative arc aimed toward spring and renewal, suggests no such thing. Ultimately, the restored version is a more poignant book, for its concluding images resonate with Plath's dedication: to her children.

In her foreword Frieda Hughes chooses to review the biographical context surrounding Ariel. She argues that the variant of Plath's style that made her name--a newly daring voice that savaged proprieties and blurred boundaries between personal and cultural violence--emerged as early as two years before Plath's death. As such, the new style predated the failure of her marriage, although the tropes of that failure served Plath conceptually and imaginatively: "The breakdown of the marriage had defined all my mother's other pain and given it direction. It brought a theme to the poetry." Frieda Hughes takes pains to defend her father while attempting to restore her mother to human dimensions. She negotiates between her loyalties in an act of redress. The wounding of both of her parents is alive for her--and the profound injustice of it. And yet in her account a sense of the mystery and ferocity of Plath's poetry is not diminished. In an eerie echo of Lowell, she identifies the voice in Plath's poems as if it were operating and developing apart from Plath, like a golem made of words: "It was as though it had been waiting, practicing itself, and had found a subject on which it could really get a grip" (emphasis mine).