The Importance of Order in Sylvia Plath's Ariel

1) In looking at the books Romey’s Order, Ariel, and Questions of Travel by Atsuro Riley, Sylvia Plath, and Elizabeth Bishop, how do the respective authors organize their books of poetry? Why books of poetry instead of individual poems?

2)  “The Two Ariels,” by Marjorie Perloff, discusses the problem of the two versions of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel manuscript: the one that Plath herself put together and the one that Ted Hughes arranged and published after her suicide. Perloff points out that the narrative arcs of the two books are radically different thanks to the rearranging of the poems and the absence or presence of other poems. Where Plath ends her version with a sequence of beekeeping poems that explores the hive’s survival of winter and rebirth into spring, Hughes undermines that sequence by adding several poems of quiet despair. This edit, she argues, replaces Plath’s narrative of rebirth of the self, a life-giving renewal, with a narrative that ends in despair, the poet’s rebirth collapsing – leading to the cold perfection of death. In addition, Hughes’ rearranging of the poems in the manuscript destroys Plath’s scathing indictment of the story of the breaking up of their marriage. To look more closely at how that rearranging and replacing affects individual poems, Perloff looks at individual poems: her analysis of “Daddy” is particularly convincing. By replacing the more vindictive, personal poems with poems that take less imagery from biography and more from holocaust history, Hughes disguises the poem behind its Nazi imagery. Instead of reading the poem as the vitriolic attack that it is in Plath’s version of the manuscript, the poem becomes far more of an exercise in the pop psychology of the Electra complex.

3) Marjorie Perloff’s analysis of the construction of the two different versions of a single book of poetry is both fascinating and informative. It contributes to my ability to look at books of poetry as a whole and see how individual poems relate to each other in sequence.