Kate Moses: On Ariel
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