Free Ariel: The Restored Edition by Sylvia Plath Page B

page in the manuscript—it was only finished in January 1963. My father included it in the first published version of Ariel .) For the title poem my mother simply writes: ‘Another horseback riding poem, this one called ‘Ariel’, after a horse I’m especially fond of.’
    These introductions made me smile; they have to be the most understated commentaries imaginable for poems that are pared down to their sharpest points of imagery and delivered with tremendous skill. When I read them I imagine my mother, reluctant to undermine with explanation the concentrated energy she’d poured into her verse, in order to preserve its ability to shock and surprise.
    In considering Ariel for publication my father had faced a dilemma. He was well aware of the extreme ferocity with which some of my mother’s poems dismembered those close to her—her husband, her mother, her father, and my father’s uncle Walter, even neighbours and acquaintances. He wished to give the book a broader perspective in order to make it more acceptable to readers, rather than alienate them. He felt that some of the nineteen late poems, written after the manuscript was completed, should be represented. ‘I simply wanted to make it the best book I could,’ he told me. He was aware that many of my mother’s new poems had been turned down by magazines because of their extreme nature, though editors still in possession of her poems published them quickly when she died.
    My father left out some of the more lacerating poems. ‘Lesbos’, for instance, though published in the U.S. version of Ariel , was taken out of the British edition, as the couple so wickedly depicted in it lived in Cornwall and would have been much offended by its publication. ‘Stopped Dead’, referring to my father’s uncle Walter, was dropped. Some he might otherwise have taken out had been published in periodicals and were already well known. Other omissions—‘Magi’ and ‘Barren Woman’, for instance, both from the transitional poems—he simply considered weaker than their replacements. One of the five bee poems, ‘The Swarm’, was originally included in my mother’s contents list, but with brackets around it, and the poem itself was not included in her manuscript of forty poems. My father reinstated it in the U.S. edition.
    The poems of the original manuscript my father left out were: ‘The Rabbit Catcher’, ‘Thalidomide’, ‘Barren Woman’, ‘A Secret’, ‘The Jailor’, ‘The Detective’, ‘Magi’, ‘The Other’, ‘Stopped Dead’, ‘The Courage of Shutting-Up’, ‘Purdah’, ‘Amnesiac’. (Though included in the 1966 U.S. version, ‘Lesbos’ was kept out of the 1965 U.K. edition.)
    The poems he put into the edited manuscript for publication were: ‘The Swarm’ and ‘Mary’s Song’ (only in the U.S. edition), ‘Sheep in Fog’, ‘The Hanging Man’, ‘Little Fugue’, ‘Years’, ‘The Munich Mannequins’, ‘Totem’, ‘Paralytic’, ‘Balloons’, ‘Poppies in July’, ‘Kindness’, ‘Contusion’, ‘Edge’, and ‘Words’. ‘The Swarm’ was included in the original contents list, but not in the manuscript.
    In 1981 my father published my mother’s Collected Poems and included in the Notes the contents list of her Ariel manuscript. This inclusion brought my father’s arrangement under public scrutiny, and he was much criticized for not publishing Ariel as my mother had left it, though the extracted poems were included in the Collected Poems for all to see.
    My father had a profound respect for my mother’s work in spite of being one of the subjects of its fury. For him the work was the thing, and he saw the care of it as a means of tribute and a responsibility.
    But the point of anguish at which my mother killed herself was taken over by strangers, possessed and reshaped by them. The collection of Ariel poems became symbolic to me of this possession of my mother and of the wider vilification of my father. It was as if