‘I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.’

It is sixty years since Ariel was first published. The poems were written in an extraordinary burst of creativity just before Sylvia Plath’s death in 1963, and they went on to establish her reputation as one of the most original and gifted poets of the twentieth century.

The critic Al Alvarez, reviewing the collection in the Observer, wrote: ‘If the poems are despairing, vengeful and destructive, they are at the same time tender, open to things, and also unusually clever, sardonic, hardminded . . . They are works of great artistic purity and, despite all the nihilism, great generosity . . . the book is a major literary event.’

The poet Emily Berry offers an introduction that gives readers, old and new, a way into the poems, and demonstrates Plath’s profound and enduring influence down the generations.