Great Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company is bringing an evening of Sylvia Plath to the Brooklyn Academy. Her work, including "Three Women," the only verse play she ever wrote, is to be in repertory with Shakespeare's "Richard II" starting Tuesday. This is prestigious indeed. Why Plath and why now? Sylvia Plath was a poet who committed suicide in 1963 when she was 31 years old, leaving two children, and a body of brilliant work. She was at the height of her powers. There is some controversy as to whether the dramatic details of her death brought her to prominence, or whether her present acclaim is indeed due to her talent. There is a need in most of us to think of the poet as sacrificial victim; as if the poet's unhappy history added additional weight to the poetry itself, surrounding her work with an ambiance of religiosity. Plath satisfies this need, though she herself would have been distressed by an audience drawn to her by morbidity. Her work is incisive, bright, intelligent, not the least bit self-pitying in spite of its subject matter. She was full of life and had so much to look forward to that one can hardly believe, even though the evidence is in, that she chose to put her head into the oven like an unbaked loaf of bread. In-expert baker that she was, the loaf came out cold. No one could make a meal of it. She of course had planned it that way, to remain undiminished and whole...but dead. Many of her poems were rehearsals for death. She had an obsession for knowing it; something like asking a stranger you are going to meet to wear a white carnation in his buttonhole so you will recognize him. One identifies with Sylvia Plath as a woman: she was a domesticated undomestic; took care of her house and children because there was no one else to do it. She didn't love doing it. The way she'd arrange her schedule, she'd get up at 4 A.M. to write poetry, then do the other things. A. Alvarez in his study of suicide, "The Savage God," says: She was a full-time mother with a 2-year-old daughter, a baby of a few months, and a house to look after. By the time the children were in bed at night she was too tired for anything more strenuous than music and brandy and water." All mothers, even those who are not poets, know that kind of bone weariness, the emotional drain of being needed, needed, needed. Yet her work prospered. It got to the very center of her existence; it flowed from there while she masterfully controlled the flow (like a Yoga who can make his heart stop and start, who is able to remain so loose that his limbs can be braided without injury). Her life is set into her work like great folk quilts put together from exquisite bits and pieces of discarded apparel. It is woman art, patiently made and true to herself. Malevolence visited itself upon her in ordinary surroundings: She reveled as she described "the stink of fat and baby crap." Nothing was too banal for her to raise to poetry. Even her children, whom she did love, were sacrificed to poetry and used to martyr her upon the domestic cross: She welcomes the cut, anything that would make her feel. Ordinary life numbed her, and so finding herself accidentally injured while preparing food, she is elated: Of skin. . . Always the observer, she was able to distance herself. One imagines that had the thumb not healed itself, she would have watched herself bleed to death. Reading her poems, we are put in the position of observer, we have taken over her post, and we are left to grieve for her. Plath's poetry is organic, homegrown: birth fruit, the mother's lump of mortality. She, as woman, was in touch with everything cyclical and round. In "Three Women," the verse play she wrote for radio, set in a maternity ward, she says: In the same play, she accuses men of being destroyers because their inheritance is one of flatness: Her anger, her rage against men, may have had its roots in a family tragedy. When she was 10 her father died; she interpreted this as his abandonment of her: She also found it difficult to reconcile the conflict between the lifestyle of a poet- intellectual and that of a wife and mother, so she wrote: "It's quite amazing how I've gone around for most of my life as in the rarefied atmosphere under a bell jar." Her novel, "The Bell Jar," a thinly disguised autobiographical work was originally published in England (Sylvia Plath was American but lived the last years of her life in England); when it was published here, it was widely read. The book chronicled the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, successful--but slowly going under and maybe for the last time." Nineteen-year-old Esther Greenwood felt that ordinariness was her enemy; observing a man she thought must be the most beautiful man she had ever seen, she says: "And then I wondered if as soon as he came to like me he would sink into ordinariness, and if as soon as he came to love me I would find fault after fault. . . The same thing happened over and over: I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer, I immediately saw he wouldn't do at all. That's one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket." In her poem, "The Applicant," Sylvia Plath mocks herself as an "it," and wickedly satirizes the emptiness of women's lives: We've come a long way since this poem was published 13 years ago, but we haven't gone all the way yet. There are still many women who exist under the stifling paternalism of the bell jar. Plath, by knowing herself intuited the new women's movement but, unlike the younger women who are today's feminists, she did not give herself options. Perhaps if she had lived longer, if she had held on, she would have shot off like colored arrows from a rocket, but her last year was a year that not many could have survived: she had a miscarriage, an appendectomy, gave birth to a second child, was separated from her husband, poet Ted Hughes, and the weather in London was the coldest it had been since 1813. Light and heat went off unannounced, pipes froze, the telephone hadn't been installed. Her writing was a deliberate expression of anguish, and so finally was her death. "Sylvia Plath" was a production so popular that its entire run in London was a sell-out. Human nature being what it is, one cannot expect that the "tragic story" will be forgotten, but one does hope that the work will be read for a long time to come. Plath's poetry and not her death was her triumphant fulfillment.