Poetry: The Way She Wanted It

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Frieda Hughes is inclined to be charitable toward her father, who did, after all, raise her after Plath's death. "Why would anybody in their right mind want to publish something that was mean and nasty about them?" she asks. "It's human nature not to want to."

That is true, but it's not the whole story. Ted Hughes' Ariel ends with "Edge," a poem about a dead woman. And that's how we have come to see Plath: as a woman who lost the battle with depression and killed herself. But that's not how she saw herself, at least not at that point, and the restored Ariel reminds us of that. It ends with the poem Plath put last: "Wintering," about suffering endured and hope renewed. "The bees are flying," its closing line reads. "They taste the spring." --Reported by Andrea Sachs