Sylvia Plath's 'Ennui'

In November 2006, news broke that a graduate student from Virginia Commonwealth University, Anna Journey, found an unpublished sonnet written by Sylvia Plath in the collection at the Lilly Library, Indiana University. Plath wrote the sonnet, entitled 'Ennui', in 1955 while still an undergraduate student at Smith College. The news received a huge amount of international press and the web-based literary journal Blackbird published the poem on 1 November, 2006 (Fall 2006, Vol. 5 No. 2). The Guardian ran an article, found online here. At the time, Journey was a contributing editor of Blackbird.

I admit to being excited when the news broke, but I was quickly disappointed. The poem 'Ennui' is listed in the Juvenilia section of Plath's Collected Poems, hardly qualifying it as a found poem. Whoever sold this story to the press is something of a genius. This was in no way news, and it was in no way a discovered poem. Many of Plath's pre-1956 poems remain unpublished and further, are uncollected. I, too, have found them during my research trips to various Plath archives.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this news story was Journey's bringing to light marginalia Plath made in her copy of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzerald. There is something poetic in penning a sonnet entitled 'Ennui' based on this American classic. But even still, an article by Park Bucker, published in 1995, pointed out Plath's annotation in The Great Gatsby. You can read Bucker's "Princess Daisy: A Description of Sylvia Plath's Copy of The Great Gatsby" online here. The title page and Plath's bookplate are reproduced on the web site.

Blackbird and the 'Ennui' story are online here. In addition to an introduction, acknowledgments, and contributor's notes, the web site contains links to Plath's typescripts of the poem and a scanned page from The Great Gatsby.

Am I alone in the disappointment of what this news story seemed to announce: that a piece of writing by Plath, presumed lost or otherwise unknown, would be available for the first time? It reminded me of the hoax story from 2002 announcing that Plath's lost journals had been found.

The image is of Walter Richard Sickert's Ennui (circa 1914), from the Tate Collection, London.

Famous Quotes of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath inspires us all in various and wonderful ways. She is in many respects a form of comfort to us, which is something that Esther Greenwood expresses in The Bell Jar , about a bath: "There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.'" We read and remember Sylvia Plath for many reasons, many of them deeply personal and private. But we commemorate her, too, in very public ways, as Anna of the long-standing Tumblr Loving Sylvia Plath , has been tracking, in the form of tattoos. (Anna's on Instagram with it too, as SylviaPlathInk .) The above bath quote is among Sylvia Plath's most famous. It often appears here and there and it is stripped of its context. But I think most people will know it is from her nove...

Sylvia Plath's Gravestone Vandalized

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Sylvia Plath and McLean Hospital

In August when I was in the final preparations for the tour of Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar sites, I found that I had long been mistaken about a couple of things. This is my coming clean. It was my intention in this blog post to discuss just McLean, but I found myself deeply immersed in other aspects of Plath's recovery. The other thing I was mistaken about will be discussed in a separate blog post. I suppose I need to state from the outset that I am drawing conclusions from Plath's actual experiences from what she wrote in The Bell Jar and vice versa, taking information from the novel that is presently unconfirmed or murky and applying it to Plath's biography. There is enough in The Bell Jar , I think, based on real life to make these decisions. At the same time, I like to think that I know enough to distinguish where things are authentic and where details were clearly made up, slightly fudged, or out of chronological order. McLean Hospital was Plath's third and last...

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