“I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air.”

In October 1962, Sylvia Plath was living at Court Green, a large thatched house in Devon, with a two-year-old, a nine-month-old, and a marriage that had just ended. She got up before dawn and wrote until the children woke.

This edition opens with the one she wrote on the morning of her thirtieth birthday—a horse ride into the sunrise, and one of the fastest poems in the language. What follows is bees, a cut thumb, a fever, a newborn’s cry taking its place among the elements, a dead father addressed as though he were alive to hear it.

Published in 1965, two years after Plath’s death, Ariel has been imitated ever since and never once matched.