Plath entered a productive period in 1962, when a renewed vigor and daring took her into ever-deepening levels of psychic expression. Her health and emotional stability declined with the birth of a son, Nicholas Farrar. She was antagonized by her husband's adulteries, and she burned a stack of manuscripts (her own and Hughes') and filed for divorce. Seeking renewal in the visionary works of William Butler Yeats, she moved the children to Chalk Farm in London. During a wretched winter, after supplying each crib with a mug of milk and stuffing the crevices with towels, on February 11, 1963, she committed suicide by overdosing on barbiturates and inhaling gas from the kitchen stove.
Plath was much missed. Her friend, poet Anne Sexton, composed a Unitarian eulogy and wrote a verse tribute. Literary fans and cultists welcomed posthumous publication of Ariel (1965), a verse study of the patriarchy of her husband and father. Additional titles — Crossing the Water: Transitional Poems (1971), Winter Trees (1972), and Letters Home: Correspondence, 1950–1963 (1975), edited by her mother — strengthened Plath's place among feminists. Hughes issued his ex-wife's prose (minus one he chose to destroy) in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams and Other Prose Writings (1977), The Collected Poems (1981), and The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982). On the strength of these works, Plath earned the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Her work continues to influence the writings of a new generation of feminists.
