Student finds unpublished Plath poem that 'riffs' off Great Gatsby

A previously unpublished sonnet in which the renowned American writer Sylvia Plath "riffs" off a passage in The Great Gatsby is to appear Wednesday in an online journal.

Anna Journey, a graduate student in creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University, discovered the poem, titled Ennui (Boredom), as well as a reference to it in Plath's personal copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic American novel The Great Gatsby.

Plath, who committedsuicide in 1963 at age 30, had written the word l'ennui next to a passage in which Jay Gatsby's love interest, Daisy Buchanan, complains, "I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything."

"She was observing; her notes were creative, metaphorical reactions," Journey said. "She was riffing off of Fitzgerald's passages."

Journeydiscovered the work while studying the young poet's archives at Indiana University.

Plath, the author of The Bell Jar and The Colossus, wrote the verse in 1955 while she was a student at Smith College.

The 14-line sonnet opens: "Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe, designing futures where nothing will occur."

Plath then explores the theme of thwarted hopes, again an apparent reference to Fitzgerald's novel.

Plath, often regarded as one of the first feminist novelists,hadsuffered from depression throughout her life.

Her biographer, Linda Wagner-Martin, says there may be more early, unpublished works by the prolific writer.

This discovery is noteworthy because it shows both the humour and the anger at work in Plath's poetry at an early age, she said.

Plath's husband, the late British poet Ted Hughes, published a collection of Plath's poetry in 1981, but he did not gather her earliest work, Wagner-Martin said.

"He had the audacity to say, 'Plath's career started when she met me,"' said Wagner-Martin, a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina and author of Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life.