Ariel

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But it's worth saying that this edition is based on the 1965 version 'edited' by Ted Hughes which took out poems which he considered too aggressive (presumably towards him? The tone is far too abrasive to dismiss the speaker entirely as a fictional persona, especially as she conducts her attempted exorcism of her father’s spectral image; her lack of coherent self and accusations of how ‘daddy’ informed her attitudes towards men is startlingly direct. The book's protagonist, Esther Greenwood, is a bright, ambitious student at Smith College who begins to experience a mental breakdown while interning for a fashion magazine in New York. While it is not used to refer to a particular person or type of person in this stanza, today, it is still considered racist to do so. Sylvia’s virulent words become everlasting vessels, carriers of existential vision, ships of meaning that will perpetually sail the wintry dark waters of countless readers breaking through their foggy minds and dormant hearts.

Ariel by Sylvia Plath | Goodreads

Sylvia Plath went on an expedition to a sort of emotional Antarctica, a place most people have heard of but never visited, where you experience love so intensely that it ends up killing you.So I was filing and I knew I could destroy them if I chose, just like that, but I didn't choose to that day.

Ariel (poetry collection) - Wikipedia

The poems in Ariel are brilliant and powerful, but often sad, since they were written at a devastating time in Plath's life.As she rides, she begins to lose pieces of herself; she is shedding her past life and “stringencies” and becoming something new. In the poem, Sylvia Plath uses racial slurs, which have been censored in the analysis using asterisks (*****).