This Week in Literary History: Sylvia Plath Writes the Poem “Ariel” on Her 30th Birthday

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Sylvia Plath writes the poem “Ariel” on her 30th birthday. 

On October 27, 1962, which also happened to be her 30th birthday, Sylvia Plath sat down and composed the poem “Ariel,” which she dedicated to poet and close friend Al Alvarez, and which she would later choose as the title poem of her second, most beloved, “tasteless” collection of poetry, which was originally published (in somewhat mangled form, thanks to Ted Hughes) in 1965, two years after her death.

“As well as being the airy spirit eventually released by Prospero in The Tempest, Ariel was the name of a horse that Plath used to ride in Devon,” explains scholar Mark Ford in his close reading of the poem. 

Like a number of the poems that she wrote in the aftermath of the collapse of her marriage to Ted Hughes earlier that summer, ‘Ariel’ transforms an everyday rural activity—horse riding—into a vividly charged narrative, dramatising extreme, vertiginous, conflicted emotions. Her use of the word ‘Suicidal’ towards the end of ‘Ariel’ has meant that the poem has often been read as enacting her compulsion to dice with death . . . 

What is perhaps most fascinating about the volume’s title poem, however, is its layering of the thrilling physical and visual experience of an early morning horse ride with Plath’s equally thrilling quest for a new kind of poetry, one able to communicate, through the energy of its rhythms and the violence of its imagery, dangerously powerful, indeed overwhelming, feelings.

You can read the poem in Plath’s own hand here.

Since Plath’s death, she has become a mythic literary figure almost without rival, an international cultural touchstone (for better or for worse) whose life and legacy continues to inspire obsession, communion, gravesite pilgrimages, suspect purchases, other writers, cool-girl musicians, movies, parodies, and endless controversies over who she really was and how she should be remembered. Which is not to mention the ongoing trickle of discoveries and biographies and revelations and reissues. Then, of course, there are the poems themselves. Let’s not forget about those.

SPONSORED BY FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX

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WRITERS HAVE TO LIVE THEIR LIVES TOO

“I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love’s not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I’ll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time.”

In other (old)

news this week

Maxim Gorky’s Children of the Sun, which was written in prison during the Russian Revolution, premieres (October 24, 1905) • Raymond Chandler begins work on his final novel (October 24, 1958) • No thanks to his dog, John Steinbeck is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (October 25, 1962) • Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room is published (October 26, 1922) • Jonathan Swift publishes the succinctly titled Gulliver’s Travels, or Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships (October 28, 1726) • Ernest Hemingway is awarded the Nobel Prize, “for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style.” (October 28, 1954) • Samuel Beckett’s monologue Krapp’s Last Tape is performed for the first time at the Royal Court Theatre in London (October 28, 1958) • The first sound film adaptation of a Shakespeare play (The Taming of the Shrew, starring Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks) is released in the United States (October 29, 1929) • Boris Pasternak rejects his Nobel Prize (October 29, 1958) • Jane Austen’s novel of unfairness Sense and Sensibility is published (October 30, 1811) • Orson Welles reads his adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds on the radio, general panic ensues (October 30, 1938)

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“In a time of destruction, create something. A poem. A parade. A community. A school. A vow. A moral principle. One peaceful moment.”

–MAXINE HONG KINGSTON

Born this week in 1940

“I fell in love—that is the only expression I can think of—at once, and am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behavior very well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even learned to beat them now and then, which they appear to enjoy.”

–DYLAN THOMAS

Born this week in 1914

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