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. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
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How does the published Ariel differ from the book Sylvia Plath planned?
Ted Hughes reordered, cut and added poems in 1965; a 2004 edition restored Plath's own arrangement.
The 1965 edition was not the book Plath had left. Her widower, the poet Ted Hughes, edited the collection after her death and made substantial changes to her intended plan by changing the order of the poems, dropping some pieces and adding others. The scholar Marjorie Perloff has noted that Plath herself had arranged the poems in a careful sequence, down to the first and last words of the volume. A new edition published in 2004 restored the selection and arrangement of the poems as Plath had left them, and it carries a foreword by her daughter, Frieda Hughes.
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Source Ariel (poetry collection) (Wikipedia)
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1. Ariel (poetry collection) (Wikipedia)
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It was first released in 1965, two years after her death by suicide.
Reception section
The fact remains that Plath herself had arranged the future Ariel poems 'in a careful sequence,' plotting out every detail including the first and last words of the volume.
Wikipedia Awards section, checked 2026-09-27
1982 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
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Ariel is Sylvia Plath's second collection of poetry.
Authored By: Sylvia Plath, Lead, editorial
Ted Hughes, Plath's widower and the editor of Ariel, made substantial changes to her intended plan for the collection by changing her ordering of the poems, dropping some pieces, and adding others.
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