As the world rushed toward a second global war, Millay issued Make Bright the Arrows: 1940 Notebook (1940), There Are No Islands Any More (1940), Collected Sonnets (1941), the Writers' War Board radio play The Murder of Lidice (1942), which details Nazi atrocities, and Collected Lyrics (1943), which influenced the style of poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Intense radical propaganda and political activism weakened her further in 1944, when she published Poem and Prayer for an Invading Army. While in seclusion in the months following her husband's death, she drank heavily. On October 19, 1950, she died of heart failure at the head of the stairs in her home. Steepletop, the country estate where her ashes are interred, was the setting for a private funeral. Her last volume, Mine the Harvest, issued in 1954, contains works from the last decade of her life and features her salute to the sonnet, "I Will Put Chaos into Fourteen Lines."
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