Sylvia Plath is a member of that select club of creative people who died young and achieved astonishing fame after death.

We cannot know whether she really intended to gas herself in February 1963. It could have been a cry for help and the drawing of a line under a failed marriage and an indifferent critical response to her work.

Dr Tim Kendall in his Talking Poetry lecture in the Market Theatre pointed out that Plath knew she was producing incredible work at the end. "These poems will make my name," she told her mother, and they did.

Dr Kendall, the author of Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study (Faber), drew an distinction between the colours and energy of the October 1962 poems for the Ariel series and the whiteness and stillness in her final work, such as Edge, written days before her death. Given Plath's history of suicide attempts, I'm not so sure. For instance in the last poem of the autumn series, Death and Co, Plath describes dead babies in the "flutings of their Ionian/ Death-gowns". In Edge, where dead babies are laid by their dead mother, the classical imagery returns. The dead woman is "perfected" and "the illusion of a Greek necessity/ Flows in the scrolls of her toga".

Dr Kendall presented Plath as the image of a driven, dedicated and neglected poet. She would get up at 4am to write, before her children stirred. Her dedication is a model to follow. But ultimately, because Plath was so psychically damaged, one cannot live one's life by her example; only end it.

Gary Bills-Geddes