Ariel

A poetry collection by the American poet Sylvia Plath, published by Faber and Faber in London in 1965, two years after her death by suicide, and considered the central book of her reputation as a confessional poet. Its title poem and others, including Daddy and Lady Lazarus, were written in the last months of her life in a burst of productivity during the autumn of 1962. Plath's husband, the poet Ted Hughes, edited the book after her death and made substantial changes to the collection she had left arranged in a careful sequence of her own, dropping some poems, adding others written later and reordering the whole so that it read differently from what she had planned; a version closer to her own intended arrangement was published decades later as Ariel: The Restored Edition. The poems' unflinching treatment of rage, death and the self helped define confessional poetry for a generation of readers.