Middle English – a style he used throughout his career – over the more genteel latinate sounds. The couple moved to America so that Plath could take a teaching position at her alma mater, Smith College; during this time, Hughes taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In 1958, they met Leonard Baskin, who would later illustrate many of Hughes's books, including Crow. The couple returned to England, staying for a short while back in Heptonstall and then finding a small flat in Primrose Hill, London. They were both writing, Hughes working on programmes for the BBC as well as producing essays, articles, reviews, and talks. During this time, he wrote the poems that would be published in Wodwo (1967) and Recklings (1966). In March 1960, Lupercal came out and won the Hawthornden Prize. He found he was being labelled as the poet of the wild, writing only about animals. He began to seriously explore myth and esoteric practices including shamanism, alchemy and Buddhism with The Tibetan Book of the Dead being a particular focus in the early 1960s. He believed that imagination could heal dualistic splits in the human psyche and poetry was the language of that work. Hughes and Plath had two children, Frieda Rebecca (b. 1960) and Nicholas Farrar (1962–2009) and, in 1961, bought the house Court Green, in North Tawton, Devon. In the summer of 1962, Hughes began an affair with Assia Wevill who had been subletting the Primrose Hill flat with her husband. Under the cloud of his affair, Hughes and Plath separated in the autumn of 1962 and she set up life in a new flat with the children. Letters written by Plath between 18 February 1960 and 4 February 1963, unseen until 2017, accuse Hughes of physically abusing her only days before she miscarried their second child in 1961. Death of Sylvia Plath Beset by depression made worse by her husband's affair and with a history of suicide attempts, Plath took her own life on 11 February 1963. Hughes dramatically wrote in a letter to an old friend of Plath's from Smith College, "That's the end of my life. The rest is posthumous." Some people argued that Hughes had driven Plath to suicide. Plath's gravestone in Heptonstall was repeatedly vandalized by those aggrieved that "Hughes" is written on the stone and attempted to chisel it off, leaving only the name "Sylvia Plath". Plath's