The Way She Wanted It

By Lev Grossman

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, you do not hire the guy who just broke that person's heart.

Now, 41 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 in Wales. "When you're a child and you're growing up with something that happened as it happened in my childhood, you often don't want to look at it."

These are not undiscovered manuscripts--everything in the restored version of Ariel has appeared elsewhere--but any excuse to reread Plath is a good one. We think of anger as an ugly emotion, but in poems like "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy," Plath refines it to a state so pure that it becomes almost unbearably beautiful. Her poems unfold in a burnt winter landscape, lit by cold, melancholy sunlight and littered with strangled, frozen hopes, where her only chance is to draw strength from pain. "Beware," she cautions in "Lady Lazarus," "Out of the ash/ I rise with my red hair/ And I eat men like air."

So what has changed in Ariel: The Restored Edition? Twelve poems have been reinstated--poems that Hughes removed, he later wrote, because they were "personally aggressive." Well, yes. In "The Rabbit Catcher," Plath assumes the role of a bunny strangled by wire snares set by a man with whom she has a "relationship." "The Other," a poem about infidelity, begins with the line "You come in late, wiping your lips"--an opening-bell knockout. Rarely is the fac,ade of marital bliss shown up so bleakly as in "The Detective": "This is the smell of years burning, here in the kitchen/ These are the deceits, tacked up like family photographs,/ And this is a man, look at his smile." These are powerful poems, not outtakes and B sides, and if they expose Plath's personal pain, they also enrich our sense of her state of mind at the height of her powers.

Frieda Hughes is inclined to be charitable toward her father, who did, after all, raise her after Plath's death. "Why would anybody in their right mind want to publish something that was mean and nasty about them?" she asks. "It's human nature not to want to."

That is true, but it's not the whole story. Ted Hughes' Ariel ends with "Edge," a poem about a dead woman. And that's how we have come to see Plath: as a woman who lost the battle with depression and killed herself. But that's not how she saw herself, at least not at that point, and the restored Ariel reminds us of that. It ends with the poem Plath put last: "Wintering," about suffering endured and hope renewed. "The bees are flying," its closing line reads. "They taste the spring." --Reported by Andrea Sachs

With reporting by Andrea Sachs