Ariel by Sylvia Plath (Book Analysis) E-Book

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• Herausgeber: BrightSummaries.com
• Kategorie: Bildung
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• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 20

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Unlock the more straightforward side of Ariel with this concise and insightful summary and analysis!

This engaging summary presents an analysis of Ariel by Sylvia Plath, the author’s final collection of poetry, which was first published in 1965, two years after her suicide. Many of the poems it contains were written in her final winter before her death, and the collection as a whole explores subjects including mental illness, depression, motherhood, illness and family relationships. This analysis features an outline of the overarching structure and key themes of the collections, as well as a closer reading of the poems “Ariel”, “Daddy”, “Lady Lazarus” and “Tulips”. Sylvia Plath was an American novelist and poet. Her best-known works are the novel The Bell Jar (first published in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas) and the poetry collection Ariel.

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• Key themes and symbols
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Leseprobe

SYLVIA PLATH

AMERICAN POET AND AUTHOR

Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1932.Died in Primrose Hill, London in 1963.Notable works:The Colossus and Other Poems (1960), poetry collectionThe Bell Jar (1963), novel

Sylvia Plath was an American poet and author. Her two poetry collections and only novel—known for their raw and at times brutal honesty—are often seen as formative works in the confessional school of literature. Plath was brought up in Boston, Massachusetts. As a teenager she was the winner of a magazine fiction competition and recipient of a scholarship to attend the women’s liberal arts college, Smith College, where she majored in English. After a nervous breakdown and attempted suicide, she was committed into a psychiatric hospital where she underwent electroconvulsive therapy. After graduating from Smith College, Plath moved to the United Kingdom to study in Cambridge under a Fulbright scholarship, where she met the poet Ted Hughes (1930-1998), whom she married in 1956. The couple had two children before Plath’s suicide in 1963. Sylvia Plath’s writing often centres on her own experiences of alienation and depression, and the particular difficulties of 20th century women. Her works have sadly often been overshadowed by the speculation and mythology surrounding her marriage to Hughes and her death by suicide. Nonetheless, her writing remains amongst the most uncompromisingly honest and remarkable portrayals of motherhood and mental illness to date.

ARIEL

SYLVIA PLATH’S VIVID FINAL COLLECTION

Genre: poetry collectionReference edition: Plath, S. (1965) Ariel. London: Faber and Faber.1stedition: 1965Themes: motherhood, depression, death, objects, womanhood

Published two years after her death, Sylvia Plath’s final collection of poems was largely composed in the poet’s final winter before her suicide. The poems are popularly considered her finest works and won Plath a cult following after her death. Written during the one of the coldest winters that London had known, Plath wrote the collection stuck in the house with her two children because of the snow. Her husband, Ted Hughes, had left her earlier that year for another woman. The collection traverses themes of mental distress, depression, motherhood and illness with a near-brutal precision. Before publication, Hughes edited and rearranged the original selection Plath had made for the collection, reordering the poems and switching 12 poems for 12 written at a later date. The version we know is this posthumous edit.