Reading The Colossus and Ariel … on the assumption, perhaps perverse but useful for analysis, that the poetry has nothing to do with the suicide and must be approached like other poetry as a tissue of language, there remains the startling phenomenon of a poet finding her own voice in the space of a very few years, through an almost complete reversal of stylistic direction…. I want to suggest, first, that the poetic strength of Ariel lies in its fusion of personal voice with national voice in an Americanism which takes the form of strict—or strident—insistence on immediate factual reality; and second, that this strength, mostly missing in The Colossus, is achieved in Ariel by means of a poetic technique, again essentially American, which consists in taking poetic risks. (p. 202)

The difference between The Colossus and Ariel lies in the poet's advancing will and ability to do...