The other Ariel

"Lynda K. Bundtzen examines Plath's original typescript for Ariel and compares it with the version that was published by her estranged husband, Ted Hughes. In his role as Plath's literary executor and Ariel's editor, Hughes deleted twelve poems that he considered too "personally aggressive" in their attacks on him, while adding several others composed in the final weeks of Plath's life and colored by her suicidal depression." "Bundtzen argues that Plath's original plan represented a conscious response to her disintegrating marriage - the swearing off of an old life with Hughes and the creation of a new self as a woman and poet. The poems Hughes deleted show her in an angry dialogue over their marital breakup, with Plath writing several of these bitterly ironic poems on the verso of Hughes's manuscript for an unpublished play entitled "The Calm." Beneath the surface of Hughes's "calm" we see a tempest building, created by the woman who chose Shakespeare's Ariel as her poetic identity."--BOOK JACKET.