Ariel (Complete Edition)

Ariel is the last collection of poems that the American poet Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) arranged by hand for publication during her lifetime, though she did not live to see it in print. When she died in London in 1963, she left on her desk a manuscript ordered according to her own wishes; in 1965, an edition edited by her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, appeared, but he altered the sequence and replaced some poems, turning a collection originally meant to "begin with love and end with spring" into something else entirely. In 2004, her daughter Frieda Hughes restored the 41 poems as Plath had arranged them, based on the manuscript—this is the "restored manuscript edition." This Chinese edition is based primarily on the restored "Plath's own arrangement," with an additional 14 poems selected by Hughes for the English and American editions, totaling 55 poems. It also includes a long introduction by the translators Chen Li and Chang Fen-ling, "The Ariel in the Bottle: Revisiting Sylvia Plath," Frieda Hughes's foreword and related interviews, and Plath's script for a BBC radio program, allowing readers to see both the poet's original intent and the shadow of history within a single volume. Poems in the collection such as "Morning Song," "Daddy," "Lady Lazarus," "The Rabbit Catcher," "Tulips," "The Bee Meeting," and "Wintering" have become repeatedly quoted and translated classics of twentieth-century poetry. Plath writes with an almost scorching candor about childbirth, motherhood, marriage, trauma, and death; her imagery is sharp and her rhythm urgent, and she is regarded as the most extreme and most brilliant practitioner of "confessional" poetry. In 1982, she was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for this final work, becoming the first poet to receive the award after death.