A TOUCH OF THE POET by Eugene O'Neill
O'Neill's magnificent obsession was that a life of illusions is unpardonable but that a life without illusions is unbearable. This produces the fierce tension at the heart of his dramatic imagination.
In A Touch of the Poet, as elsewhere, O'Neill dramatizes, in the agitated course of a single day, the downward course of a lifetime. He tells of a man whose life would crumble except for his dreams and whose dreams themselves fall apart at last. And, as so often in O'Neill, Poet has centripetal force and...