Sylvia Plath was born in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, the older child of Otto and Aurelia Schoeber Plath. Her father was professor of German and entomology (a specialist on bees) at Boston University; her mother, a high school teacher, was his student. Both parents valued learning. In 1940 Otto died of complications from surgery after a leg amputation, and Aurelia's parents became part of the household to care for the children when she returned to teaching.

Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on 27 October (she shared a birthday with Dylan Thomas), and spent her childhood in Winthrop. When she was 8 her German father, a professor at Boston University, died of diabetes. Two years later her mother moved the family inland to Wellesley, where she struggled to give Sylvia and her younger brother every advantage of a superior education. Self-consciousness and anxiety about status and money during adolescence contributed to the profound insecurity Plath concealed all her life beneath a façade of brassy energy and brilliant achievement.

Ariel as edited by Ted Hughes has a particular trajectory.  It seems to be a narrative of a woman who is intentionally moving toward her self-destruction.  Robert Lowell’s foreword claimed “these poems are playing Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder… they tell that life, even when disciplined, is simply not worth it.”  And that became the way people saw Plath: defiantly suicidal, a lost cause from the start.  Years later, with the publication of The Birthday Letters shortly before his own death in 1998, Hughes reiterated this idea that

In "Home Burial" we have an arena reduced to a staircase, with its Hitchcockian banister. The opening line tells you as much about the actors’ positions as about their roles: those of the hunter and his prey. Or, as you’ll see later, of Pygmalion and Galatea, except that in this case the sculptor turns his living model into stone. In the final analysis, "Home Burial" is a love poem, and if only on these grounds it qualifies as a pastoral. But let’s examine this line and a half

He saw her from the bottom of the stairs Before she saw him

"After Apple-Picking," one of Frost's greatest lyrics, blends the myth of the Fall with consequences of modern science. The "two-pointed ladder" figures as both the instrument and the technology of tropism toward "heaven" that ultimately leads to the oneiric hell of uncertainty and of waste and struggle. Order, progress, and the harvest of knowledge are as much a part of the inextricable order of the garden as the great tree upon which we sway precariously:

[lines 1-6]

"The Wood-Pile" is thoroughly typical of many of Frost's mature nature poems. At once narrative and dramatic, the poem seems astonishingly clear even on first encounter. There at its center are the solitary speaker, a familiar figure, and his story, this one—like Frost's others—told in the inevitably simple, straightforward and calm, almost laconic language that characterizes dozens of Frost's other narrative lines. There is the typical stripped minimum of physical action—walking.

Again, Frost, or what a purist would call the speaker, is in a familiar stance. He is on "the edge of the dark / And the cold." And again he is aware of "precedents" in the nature of things ("saying goodby . . . Reminds me") which can be either harmful or helpful. More than half the poem is given over to what he "does not want" to happen to his orchard.

"The Need of Being Versed in Country Things," serves a function roughly analogous to that of "Design"; it reads a natural lesson the point of which is the potential uncertainty of natural lessons. The poem presents an interesting contrast to Promethean pieces like "Wild Grapes" and "There Are Roughly Zones." In each of those poems, an apparent natural lesson suggesting the limitations on human desire is cast aside in favor of a transcendent lesson reasserting the primacy of aspiration.

In "Gathering Leaves" Frost makes a lighthearted return to a season of decline, which the speaker tries to bring to an end by struggling--endlessly, it seems--to fill bags of autumn leaves. Concise, homey similes show the difficulty of the task. Spades are spoonlike in their slight ability to gather the overflow of leaves; the airiness of the leaves makes full bags resemble balloons; the noise of rustling leaves, "like rabbit and deer / Running away," seems out of proportion to his progress. Gathered leaves make mountains, yet these are small.

Ana Castillo began to write in the early days of El Movimiento when she used her work, mainly poetry, as a means of social protest along with her actual involvement in the conferences and public activities of the Chicanas. Ever since, she has become a prolific writer, defining herself from a literary point of view as a “genre jumper” constantly trying to reach more audiences for her Chicana voice.