Sylvia Plath’s undiscovered poem now live

As the Associated Press reported yesterday, an unpublished sonnet by Sylvia Plath, apparently written by the author while she was in college, while pondering themes in F Scott Fitzgerald‘s THE GREAT GATSBY, is now available at Virginia Commonwealth University‘s literary journal, Blackbird (though to get to it, you have to read through an introduction and her biography, but once that’s done you can look at different drafts to see how she created the poem.)

Anna Journey, a VCU graduate student in creative writing, claims that Plath wrote the sonnet, entitled ‘Ennui’, in 1955 during her senior year at Smith College. Journey discovered the sonnet while conducting research in the Plath archives at Indiana University. “She was observing; her notes were creative, metaphorical reactions,” Journey said. “She was riffing off of Fitzgerald’s passages.” The poem – two original typed scripts with some of Plath’s handwritten notes – apparently contains the same themes as those Plath jotted in her Fitzgerald book, including the thwarted romanticism of Gatsby, the naive knight, and the futility of idealized fairy-tale roles.

And there might be more undiscovered Plath treasures floating around. Linda Wagner-Martin, author of Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life and professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina, believes there could still exist other early, unpublished works by the prolific writer. When Plath’s widower, the poet Ted Hughes, put together a collection of her poetry in 1981, “he didn’t pay much attention to her earlier poems.”

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