Word: plath
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When Sylvia Plath killed herself early on the morning of Feb. 11, 1963, she left behind two children, an estranged, adulterous husband, a note for the baby sitter and a neat black binder containing 40 poems. The contents of that binder would become Ariel, one of the most devastatingly moving and universally beloved books of poetry published in the 20th century. But the contents of that binder and what we know as Ariel are not quite the same thing...
...After Plath died, her manuscript passed to Ted Hughes, who was legally still her husband. Hughes reordered the poems and dropped about a third of them; he also added a few poems that Plath had left out. That in itself is hardly a crime--even a genius needs a good editor once in a while--but Ariel contains a great deal of pain and sorrow and rage directed at Hughes. He was an exceptionally gifted poet himself--he would later become England's poet laureate--but if you're looking for a selfless, disinterested editor to reshape somebody's work...
...years after Plath's death, we have been given back the binder that was on her desk. Ariel: The Restored Edition (HarperCollins; 211 pages) prints the poems Plath chose for her book and in the order in which she gave them--the director's cut, as it were. It also includes a foreword by Frieda Hughes, the couple's daughter. Amazingly, before work began on the restored edition, Hughes, who is also a poet, had never read her mother's masterpiece. "Sometimes we have to wait until we're the right age for something," says Hughes, 44, who lives...
...good, really convincingly jaded, dressed in vintage clothing, eyebrow arched, drinking our coffee black? Hadn’t we founded a half-assed arts collective in our common room? Didn’t we know kind of a lot of punk songs? Couldn’t we quote Sylvia Plath to each other in flat voices—“Every woman adores a Fascist/ The boot in the face, the brute/ Brute heart of a brute like you”? Didn’t we construe practically everything ironically? Weren’t we post-angst, post-emotion...
Jack and Miles are ideal opposites. Miles is nerdy and needy, analyzing every sip of wine, fretting over every impulse, convinced that he's too insignificant a writer even to kill himself: "Hemingway, Sexton, Plath, Woolf--you can't commit suicide until you're published." Jack, whose fluorescent grin almost distracts from his fading good looks, still believes he has It. ("I get chicks lookin' at me all the time, all ages. Dudes too.") With a true actor's magnificent focus and minute attention span, he's so in the moment than he can convince himself of anything, including that...