"Ennui" is a sonnet by Sylvia Plath published for the first time in November 2006 in the online literary journal Blackbird [1]. Sylvia Plath wrote the Petrarchan sonnet “Ennui” during her undergraduate years at Smith College and may have intended to publish it, as she placed her name and address in the upper right-hand corner of the typed poem, a practice which she often followed with poems she considered good enough for submission to journals. However, she may have simply been identifying the poem for her teacher, Alfred Young Fisher, with whom she took a special studies course in poetry during the spring of her senior year in 1955. “It is difficult to realize how hard Plath worked to perfect her craft unless you read the poems written before 1956,” Karen V. Kukil, editor of The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, wrote to Blackbird; “many of these poems, like 'Ennui,' deserve publication.” Plath's original typescripts of her poem (including an earlier draft and the final finished version), which Blackbird reproduced photographically, are currently housed in the Sylvia Plath Archive of juvenilia in the Lilly Library at Indiana University under the label “Ennui (I).”
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Anna Journey, a former graduate student in creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University, and current Ph.D. candidate at the University of Houston, discovered that this poem was unpublished, and brought it to the attention of the Blackbird editorial staff, along with a number of additional reasons why it is a poem of interest. Her essay, “Dragon Goes to Bed with Princess: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Influence on Sylvia Plath” (published in Notes on Contemporary Literature, Vol. 37.4, September, 2007), explores in detail how “Ennui” germinated from Plath’s creative response to The Great Gatsby, as evidenced by her handwritten notes in her personal copy of that novel (housed in the Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald at the University of South Carolina), as well as an essay Plath wrote on Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night. Fitzgerald’s lingering influence continued to produce echoes in Plath’s work, even in such a later poem as “Daddy”, whose last line may recall Dick Diver’s farewell to his dead father in Tender Is the Night. Plath's broad range of allusions in “Ennui” also includes Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, The Lady or the Tiger? by Frank R. Stockton, and The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James, as well as providing an indirect response to that “delicate monster”, Ennui, as it was famously described in “Au Lecteur” (“To the Reader”) by Charles Baudelaire, a poem whose sardonic tone matches Plath’s own (Blackbird, V5N2).
"Ennui", the newly discovered undergraduate sonnet by Sylvia Plath is very much about craft, about delivering a tough resonant argument. It is concerned with the art of rhetoric, densely and self-consciously built, full of literary references and brandishing its knowingness. In fact knowingness is at the heart of its gesture. The speaker is offering up her insight directly and forcefully. It is an insight that claims for itself a world-weary bitterness and disappointment - life is a let down, life is empty. Those French words (ennui, jejune, blasé, insouciant) enforce this sense of sophisticated hopelessness. On one level this is very much a post-Eliot stance (and the opening quatrain is full of allusions to T. S. Eliot). But this is perhaps also typically the attitude of a certain kind of young writer. The poem is a version of 'been there, done that', a badge of identity as much as a statement of fact. I am relishing my ennui, thank you. Keep away. An interesting parallel to this is the wonderful short ballad by Emily Brontë - 'The Night is Darkening Round Me'. In contrast to 'Ennui' the Bronte poem creates a world that is heroic and sublime, dark and dangerous. The speaker is in the grip of a malevolent power, but the ballad's greatest moment comes in the twist of the final line - 'I will not, cannot go'. She is willing herself towards this fate. The speaker of 'Ennui' is trapped in a very different world, but there is a sense that she also is willing it. At times the poem's craft is very impressive. Take the second quatrain:
- Jeopardy is jejune now: naïve knight
- finds ogres out-of-date and dragons unheard
- of, while blasé princesses indict
- tilts at terror as downright absurd.
This is wonderfully taut and restless in a manner that recalls Robert Browning or William Empson. That first phrase is probably the best moment in the poem, relishing its own archness. These lines delight in a sense of near anarchic consonantal energy and the enjambment at the beginning of the third line is very effective, the way the word 'of' comes as a nervous jolt, hemmed up against the beginning of the line by that comma.
The poem ends with a slightly overwrought and grandiose set piece, half vision of apocalypse, half of packed Roman arena. The angels of Plath's sonnet (“and when insouciant angels play God's trump”) sarcastically echo the angels of Donne's sonnet to the apocalypse (“At the round earth's imagined corners, blow/ Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise”) before the poem moves on to the image of a crowd of spectators gripped by a sudden and atypical moment of hope, only, of course, to be disappointed. Nothing happens.
It is a self-conscious rejoinder to the finale of Keats' "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer", which begins 'Much have I traveled in the realms of gold', where the explorers are overwhelmed by the immensity of what they are witnessing, 'silent upon a peak in Darien'. This poem, 'Ennui', bitterly relishes its witnessing of nothing but bathos (Bainbridge, Guardian Unlimited).
This poem shows Plath in full possession of her voice: ironic, acidulous, blackly funny, and demanding more of life (Hoffert, Library Journal).
The first appearance of “Ennui” in print received international attention, from New York to New Delhi. Reports on the poem were featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian Unlimited, The International Herald Tribune, and other journals.
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