By LAWRENCE VAN GELDER
Published: November 1, 2006
A sonnet that Sylvia Plath wrote in college, inspired by F. Scott
Fitzgerald's "Great Gatsby," has been discovered and will appear today in an
online literary journal, The Associated Press reported. The previously
unpublished poem "Ennui," written by Miss Plath in 1955 during her senior
year at Smith College, was found by Anna Journey, a graduate student in
creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University, while researching the
Plath archives at Indiana University. Ms. Journey said the sonnet, in the
form of two original typed scripts with some handwritten notes, is related to
the French expression l'ennui (boredom), which Miss Plath had written in her
copy of "The Great Gatsby" next to the passage in which Daisy Buchanan, the
woman Gatsby desires, complains, "I've been everywhere and seen everything
and done everything." Ms. Journey said of Miss Plath (1932-63), "She was
riffing off of Fitzgerald's passages." Beginning with the lines "Tea leaves
thwart those who court catastrophe/designing futures where nothing will
occur," the poem is featured in Blackbird, published online
(blackbird.vcu.edu) by the English department of Virginia Commonwealth
University and New Virginia Review. Gregory Donovan, an English professor at
the university and co-editor of Blackbird, said the poem poked fun at people
who consult tea leaves or psychics in the hope of foretelling disasters while
real life itself is as dramatic and romantic as a fairy tale.
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