Containing everything that celebrated poet Sylvia Plath wrote after 1956, this is one of the most comprehensive collections of her work. Edited, annotated, and with an introduction by her husband, Ted Hughes.

Sylvia Plath churned out her final poems at the remarkable rate of two or three a day, Even more remarkable, she wrote them during one of the coldest, snowiest winters (1962-63) Londoners have ever known. Snowbound, without central heating, she and her two children spent much of their time sniffling, coughing, or running temperatures (In "Fever 103ʻ" she writes, "I have been flickering, off, on, off on. / The sheets grow heavy as a lecher's kiss.")....

"Upon the publication of her posthumous volume of poetry, Ariel, in the mid-1960s, Sylvia Plath became a household name. Readers may be surprised to learn that the draft of Ariel left behind by Sylvia Plath when she died in 1963 is different from the volume of poetry eventually published to worldwide acclaim. This facsimile edition restores, for the first time, the selection and arrangement of the poems as Sylvia Plath left them at the point of her...

Excerpts from the journals of Sylvia Plath, from her student years at Smith College through her marriage to Ted Hughes.

Many of the poems in Ariel were written in an extraordinary burst of creativity just before Sylvia Plath's death in 1963. It is the volume on which her reputation as one of the most original, daring and gifted poets of the 20th century rests. An acclaimed anthology of vivid and emotionally shattering poems, written during the last months of Plath's short life, is accompanied by a brief author profile and an incisive foreword by Robert Lowell.

A biography of the troubled woman whose literary achievements were cut short by her suicide at age thirty, interspersed with examples of her poetry.