Talk:Ariel (Plath)

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	Ariel (Plath) is part of WikiProject Poetry, a WikiProject related to Poetry.
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[edit] Lead Sentence

The best that could be said on behalf of the sentence (strike-thru applied by Jerzy•t 18:48, 26 June 2006 (UTC))

Ariel was the last book of poetry written by Sylvia Plath during her lifetime.

would be to call it incoherant. Since she wrote neither books nor poems after the end of her lifetime, the last three words are too confusing to be kept.

Beyond that, it could have been intended to say

Ariel was the last book of poetry written by Sylvia Plath.

which, (if carefully composed) would have been intended to assert that no books containing poetry she wrote were assembled later than it. That is false, according to our bio of her.

On the other hand, it could be a buggared attempt to say that she wrote no later books after that one. This, according to our bio, is too straightforward to be a fair statement of the situation: at the least, it needs to be made clear that the Ariel in the next sentence is not the same Ariel that she "wrote", since poems she apparently had decided not to include, or hadn't clearly indicated her intent to include, are in the published book.

My version may well be inadequate, but it is at least accurate, for use until someone can write and defend a more complete statement:

Ariel is the second book of Sylvia Plath's poetry to be published, in 1965, two years after her death by suicide; most of the poems included in it had been selected by her.

--Jerzy•t 18:48, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Left out of original manuscript"

Surely this is another failed attempt at expressing an idea. In this case i'm willing, after light research, to infer it intended to label the list it precedes roughly as "from MS, but left out", i.e.

"poems in (her) last manuscript, which were omitted in the 1965 edition".

(Hopefully no WP editor would bore us by listing poems she included in her first MS but later axed! That is grist for much more specialized scholarship.)

My version is "Additional poems in her manuscript"; if that will not be universally understood, i suggest a lead sent within the paragraph would be the best means of clarifying it. Of course "unpublished" is not an applicable term without distinguishing between publication in the '65 edition and some later ones.
--Jerzy•t 18:48, 26 June 2006 (UTC)