Editing Sylvia Plath (section)

===''Ariel''===
{{Main|Ariel (poetry collection)}}

{{Quote box |align=right |quoted=true |bgcolor=#FFFFF0 |salign=right
 |quote =<poem>And I
Am the arrow,

The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.</poem>
 |source=from the poem "[[Ariel (poem)|Ariel]]", October 12, 1962<ref>{{cite news |last=Plath |first=Sylvia |date=March 13, 2008 |title=Ariel |location=London |work=[[The Guardian]] |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/mar/13/poetry.sylviaplath4 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170312080603/https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/mar/13/poetry.sylviaplath4 |archive-date=March 12, 2017 |url-status=live}}</ref>}}

The posthumous publication of ''[[Ariel (poetry collection)|Ariel]]'' in 1965 precipitated Plath's rise to fame.<ref name="ODNB"/> The poems in ''Ariel'' mark a departure from her earlier work into a more personal arena of poetry. [[Robert Lowell]]'s poetry may have played a part in this shift as she cited Lowell's 1959 book ''[[Life Studies]]'' as a significant influence, in an interview just before her death.<ref name="WM184">{{harvnb|Wagner-Martin|1988|p=184}}</ref> The impact of ''Ariel'' was dramatic, with its dark and potentially autobiographical descriptions of mental illness in poems such as "[[Tulips (poem)|Tulips]]", "[[Daddy (poem)|Daddy]]" and "[[Lady Lazarus]]".<ref name="WM184"/> Plath's work is often held within the genre of [[confessional poetry]] and the style of her work compared to other contemporaries, such as Lowell and [[W.D. Snodgrass]]. Plath's close friend [[Al Alvarez]], who wrote about her extensively, said of her later work: "Plath's case is complicated by the fact that, in her mature work, she deliberately used the details of her everyday life as raw material for her art. A casual visitor or unexpected telephone call, a cut, a bruise, a kitchen bowl, a candlestick—everything became usable, charged with meaning, transformed. Her poems are full of references and images that seem impenetrable at this distance, but which could mostly be explained in footnotes by a scholar with full access to the details of her life."{{sfn|Alvarez|2007|p=214}} Many of Plath's later poems deal with what one critic calls the "domestic surreal" in which Plath takes everyday elements of life and twists the images, giving them an almost nightmarish quality. Plath's poem "Morning Song" from ''Ariel'' is regarded as one of her finest poems on ''freedom of expression'' of an artist.<ref>{{Cite web|title=10 Most Famous Poems by Sylvia Plath {{!}} Learnodo Newtonic|url=https://learnodo-newtonic.com/sylvia-plath-famous-poems|website=learnodo-newtonic.com|access-date=May 30, 2020|archive-date=August 6, 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200806125451/https://learnodo-newtonic.com/sylvia-plath-famous-poems|url-status=live}}</ref>

Plath's fellow confessional poet and friend [[Anne Sexton]] commented: "Sylvia and I would talk at length about our first suicide, in detail and in depth—between the free potato chips. Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem. Sylvia and I often talked opposites. We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric lightbulb, sucking on it. She told the story of her first suicide in sweet and loving detail, and her description in ''The Bell Jar'' is just that same story."<ref>[http://www.theparisreview.org/viewinterview.php/prmMID/4073 ''The Paris Review'' Interviews: "The Art of Poetry No. 15. Anne Sexton". Interview by Barbara Kevles. Issue 52, Summer 1971] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100613162557/http://theparisreview.org/viewinterview.php/prmMID/4073 |date=June 13, 2010 }}. Accessed July 15, 2010</ref> The confessional interpretation of Plath's work has led to some dismissing certain aspects of her work as an exposition of sentimentalist melodrama; in 2010, for example, [[Theodore Dalrymple]] asserted that Plath had been the "patron saint of self-dramatisation" and of self-pity.{{sfn|Dalrymple|2010|p=157}} Revisionist critics such as Tracy Brain have, however, argued against a tightly autobiographical interpretation of Plath's material.<ref>{{harvnb|Brain|2001}}; {{harvnb|Brain|2006|pp=[https://books.google.com/books?id=aMUkBQ-3mnUC&pg=PA11 11]–32}}; {{harvnb|Brain|2007}}</ref> On January 16, 2004, The Independent newspaper in London published an article that ranked ''Ariel'' as the 3rd best book of modern poetry among 'The 10 Best Modern Poetry Books.'