An unpublished sonnet by Sylvia Plath, written while she was a senior at Smith College in 1955, has been published in the online arts and literature journal,
Blackbird. The poem, titled "Ennui", was found in the Plath archives at Indiana University by Anna Journey, a student at Virginia Commonwealth University. Plath apparently wrote the sonnet while reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's
The Great Gatsby. In her copy of Fitzgerald's book, she wrote the phrase "L'ennui" (fr. Boredom) next to a passage where a character complains that she's "been everywhere and seen everything and done everything."
Blackbird is an online journal of literature and arts published by the English department at Virginia Commonwealth University and New Virginia Review, Inc.
Full article at Guardian Books.
"Ennui" at Blackbird.
Devious Comments
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Critiquing someone's prose or poetry is an awesome thing to do.
My spellchecker doesn't agree with my spelling of "juvenilia", btw. But it didn't give me any suggestions -- it just says "wrong". Wikipedia says, beyond explaining the term and giving first usage, "in 1973, the Times Literary Supplement questioned the worth of juvenilia." No source, no further comment, just that enigmatic sentence. And people say wikipedia is a bad information source. Being anal, I of course checked TLS's archive, but it, unfortunately, only goes back to '94. What were we talking about, again?
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ma'at: The good thing about this is it has the appearance of a bullet-proof vest, so any fanatics would be put off altogether. Or they'd simply go for a head shot.
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