bookworship 's review for:

Ariel: The Restored Edition by Sylvia Plath

5.0

dark emotional medium-paced

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Sylvia Plath’s Ariel stands as a pillar of the late American poetic canon—a work of incendiary brilliance where lyric and anguish are fused in unforgettable form. Plath’s signature diction is tight, elemental, and memorably sharp, each word chosen like a blade. Her ability to transmute mental illness, grief, and fury into mythic and natural images is nearly unmatched in modern poetry. The book's climactic moments, like the closing lines of “Lady Lazarus”—

“Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air”

—capture her poetic prowess: Few poets have written so personally and burned so universally.