Romantic Intertextuality and The Never-endingAche: O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into the Soulof the Poet

Abstract

This paper explores how Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956) retells not only stories of trauma, addiction, and avoidance, but also the soul’s ontological longing for belonging and transcendence. While scholars have thoroughly addressed O’Neill’s debts to Shakespearean and Greek tragedy, this essay deliberately shifts the Romantic intertexts embodied by the character of Edmund Tyrone, whose poetic sensibility reframes the play, in Vivian Casper’s words, as a Künstlerdrame. Drawing on Neoplatonic concepts of the anima mundi, the Burkean sublime and the long tradition of Romantic poets like Wordsworth, and Shelley, this essay argues that Edmund’s monologue positions him as the ‘poet of theatre’. By situating Edmund within a Romantic and transhistorical lineage of poets—including Emily Dickinson, John Masefield and Baudelaire—this paper suggests that O’Neill uses intertextuality to haunt modern American realism, bringing to theatre the metaphysical ache of transcendence thoroughly exposed within Romantic poetry.