Ariel
Written in the months before Plath's suicide in the winter of 1962-63, Ariel is the most ferociously concentrated burst of poetic energy in American literary history. "Lady Lazarus," "Daddy," "Edge," "Tulips": they arrive like transmissions from a consciousness stripped of all protection, every poem a high-wire act between vision and annihilation. The collection is simultaneously feminist rage, psychological document, and pure formal brilliance.
You are probably reading Hughes's arrangement, the 1965 edition he cut and reordered after Plath's death, not the manuscript she left on her desk; the difference changes the book's whole arc. 'Daddy' borrows Holocaust imagery for private grievance, a move that has drawn fire for sixty years. And the suicide reads the poems for you if you let it.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
