“And now i/ foam to wheat, a glitter of seas” – the dissolution of the self as a means of transcendence in Sylvia Plath’s poem “Ariel”

Abstract

Sylvia Plath was an American writer born in 1932. Throughout her life, she published a novel and three poetry collections. Her writing style became known as ‘confessional’, as it illustrated her personal experiences intimately and with great emotional depth. Her challenges with her mental health combined with her early suicide create the vision of a difficult, tormented, and cursed woman in the imagination of her readers, and most of her work is analyzed through this perspective. The following paper seeks to carefully analyze one of the author's best-known poems, ‘Ariel’, outside this light, through a psychological analysis supported by biographical evidence, to bring about a broader interpretation of the poem, revealing new meanings that go beyond the conventional interpretations that have been made so far.