Ariel, the slim volume of poems published posthumously under Sylvia Plath's name in 1965, has become an iconic document in twentieth-century literary history, a status underlined by the most recently published edition, which restores the selection and sequencing of the poems Plath left at the time of her death in 1963 (A Rest.). Ariel is closely identified with the disturbing power of a poetic voice whose reverberations were felt to be, from the outset, distinctively, even scandalously, female and embodied. The 'Ariel voice' seems to trope a return of the repressed, at both the personal and the political level. For the volume's first readers, of course, this voice was marked above all by its proximity to her suicide, and was apprehended as a psychic unleashing or release. Reviews frequently invoked a 'breakthrough' in style: a discovery, or recovery, of a liberating immediacy of feeling. This binary model of Plath's poetic development, grounded in a biographical narrative, was partially undermined by the appearance of the Collected Poems in 1981, which revealed the range and extent of Plath's work, and the many continuities between The Colossus (UK 1960/US 1962) and Ariel (1965/1966).