ARIEL

Upon the publication of her posthumous volume of poetry, Ariel, in the mid-1960s, the author became a household name. Readers may be surprised to learn that the draft of Ariel left behind by her when she died in 1963 is different from the volume of poetry eventually published to worldwide acclaim. This facsimile edition restores, for the first time, the selection and arrangement of the poems as she left them at the point of her death. In addition to the facsimile pages of her manuscript, this edition also includes in facsimile the complete working drafts of the title poem ''Ariel'', in order to offer a sense of her creative process, as well as notes the author made for the BBC about some of the manuscript''s poems. In her insightful foreword to this volume the author''s daughter explains the reasons for the differences between the previously published edition of Ariel as edited by her father, and her mother''s original version published here. With this publication, the author''s legacy and vision will be re-evaluated in the light of her original working draft. Sylvia Plath churned out her final poems at the remarkable rate of two or three a day, and Robert Lowell describes them as written by ''hardly a person at all ... but one of those super-real, hypnotic, great classical heroines.'' Even more remarkable, she wrote them during one of the coldest, snowiest winters (1962-63) Londoners have ever known. Snowbound, without central heating, she and her two children spent much of their time sniffling, coughing, or running temperatures (In ''Fever 103°'' she writes, ''I have been flickering, off, on, off on. / The sheets grow heavy as a lecher''s kiss.''). Pipes froze, lights failed, and candles were unobtainable. As if these physical privations weren''t enough, Plath was out in the cold in another sense--her husband, Ted Hughes, had left her for another woman earlier that year. Despite all this (or perhaps because of it), the Ariel poems dazzle with their lyricism, their surprising and vivid imagery, and their wit. Rather than confining herself to her bleak surroundings, Plath draws from a wide array of experience. In ''Berck-Plage,'' for instance, clouds are ''electrifyingly-coloured sherbets, scooped from the freeze.'' In ''The Night Dances,'' the poet st