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Conspicuous traces of "Ibsen consciousness" in A Touch of the Poet suggest that the Norwegian master may have played an important role in O'Neill's transformed dramaturgy and new approach to genre, developed in the transitional years of the 1930s while he worked on his great, unrealized historical cycle. Evidence of an Ibsen connection runs from plot similarities to thematic parallels and to an apparent structural relationship between two Ibsen plays and A Touch of the Poet.