new edition of Plath

[OP]

According to the December 6, 2004 issue of Time magazine, a new edition of Sylvia Plath's poems with a foreward by her daughter Frieda Hughes, is in print. It is called "Ariel: the Restored Edition. (HarperCollins; 211 pages). I won't go into the article about the book but it occupies a page and is informative about the poet and Ariel and Ted Hughes, who, as her still legal husband, handled and edited Ariel, omitting some poems, rearanging all, and more or less reordering the plan Plath had for the publishing of her book. The daughter, whom the article says is also a poet, excuses her father on the basis of the aggressive nature of many of Plath's planned poems with Ted Hughes as the model for the poems. Apparently Hughes brought his daughter up after Plath died.

[Monk Bretton]

This 'Restored edition' is being presented as quite a revelation, not least by the publishers. But Hughes himself published the order which Plath intended the poems to be read almost 25 years ago. It has long been possible to read the poems in any order one chooses, indeed there have even been attempts, by scholars, to create a better version of Ariel, by rejecting both Plath and Hughes' order and creating a new one.

More interesting, I think, than the wrangle over the order is the inclusion in this new book of facsimiles of Plath's own typed pages with hand-written corrections. Those familiar with the manuscript of 'Sheep In Fog' which Hughes published in Winter Pollen will be interested to see the transformations that these other poems go through. I understand, though I haven't seen any of the facsimiles, that many of the corrections and alterations are punctuation related.

The Plath estate has some very eager lawyers so it is unlikely we will see any of these facsimiles up on the web, which is a pity. Or not for long, anyway.

Frieda Hughes is indeed a poet, although not a very good one, imo.