“Out of the ash,” she writes in “Lady Lazarus,” “I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.” At once she threatens death, calls dibs on resurrection and forces her anger into the eerie cadences of a child’s rhyme. It’s tricky work, balancing dead seriousness with singsong, and the play only makes her voice more chilling.

“Ariel” closes with a vision of her own disappearance, riding naked into the great circle of the sun: “Into the red / Eye, the cauldron of morning.” The naked woman is not an exposed object — pleading for sympathy by way of her self-exposure — but an agent of force and motion. I picture this rider with her arms up, stretched into an O — the red eye — the self not so much confessed but remade in service of its song.

Leslie Jamison is the author of an essay collection, “The Empathy Exams,” winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. Her first novel, “The Gin Closet,” was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction; and her essays and stories have been published in numerous publications, including Harper’s, The Oxford American, A Public Space and The Believer.

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By Charles McGrath

Almost every page of “Ariel” suggests Plath would have become a great poet had she only let herself live.

Image Charles McGrath Credit... Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

To one degree or another, almost all poetry is confession. What is the lyric, after all, but an expression of one’s innermost thoughts and feelings? And what we call, or used to call, the confessional movement in poetry now seems a particular moment so highly strung that it burnt itself out in a decade or so. It was less a movement, in the end, than a collection of individuals — pre-­eminently Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, John Berryman and Randall Jarrell, who had in common a history of heavy drinking, mental illness, vaulting ambition and suicidal self-destruction. And their poetry was autobiographical without really being memoiristic in the way that, say, Wordsworth’s “Prelude” is. There is an actual memoir, “91 Revere Street,” embedded in Lowell’s breakthrough volume, “Life Studies,” and it couldn’t be more different from the poems that follow: They give you the breakdowns, the hangovers, the anxiety attacks pure and undiluted, without any of the prosy stuff.

Plath gets lumped in with these other, mostly older poets because of her suicide, which in retrospect looks less and less like a great career move, as Sexton sardonically joked it was, than a kind of reputational hijacking. She is now remembered for the wrong reasons — for being a victim or a monster, depending on whether you take her side or that of her husband, Ted Hughes — and celebrated for show-offy, seemingly autobiographical poems like “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus,” which don’t display her real gifts. The best poems in “Ariel” are in that more traditional lyric mode, in which experience isn’t so much confessed as transformed; in the great title poem, an early-morning horseback ride turns into an evocation of inspiration itself.