Sylvia Plath was an amazing poet who is unfortunately mostly known in the non-lit buff community by the way she died. However, you can see from this picture of a page from her copy of "The Great Gatsby" above that she read it hardcore. We thought we would give you a little bit of context of the photo because of the new film.
Plath studied a crap-ton of literature in school. It isn't immediately clear whether she was in high school or college when she annotated Gatsby, however the copy contains two different shades of ink which writer Park Bucker notes in an essay. This implies she spent either a lot of time with the work or she was studying it in different places.
In the annotated page that appears above, she underlines character Daisy's prediction of what her daughter will be like and she writes the word "L’Ennui." Plath named two of her earliest poems "L’Ennui" that reflect a post romanticism and the death of idealism, two ideas also in Gatsby, according to an essay by Anna Journey.
Gatsby may have had an influence on her poems, but there's more evidence of her admiration of the work. She also composed essays about F. Scott Fitzgerald himself, calling him "a word painter with a vivid palette," and says the writer chooses words with "jewel-cut precision," also noted by Anna Journey. So even though Plath and Fitzgerald are almost never talked about at the same time, we can regard the photo as a beautiful moment of one genius passing on ideas to another.
[via UniversityofSouthCarolina / TheFreeLibrary / DangerousMinds]
