Not long before he died, or so the story goes, Eugene O'Neill sat before a fireplace in a Boston hotel room. By nature what the psychological men call a "moody" fellow, O'Neill could scarcely have felt much warmth from the flames. As anyone who has appreciated Joan of Arc knows, fire does have its mystical aspects, and with the help of ever-solicitous Carlotta, O'Neill sat up, grasped a sheaf of papers in his palsied hands and thrust it to the flames. No telling what was in the five plays so carefully dispatched by the man who made them; O'Neill considered the stuff worthless. He certainly fixed the scholars probing his socioneuro-anthropologic motives that day.

A Touch of the Poet is the surviving granddaddy of the five destroyed plays that chronicled the doings of an Irish-American family, 1818-1932. Enemies of O'Neill will probably claim A Touch of the Poet could have met a fate similar to its offspring--with no serious loss to the American theatre. But real O'Neill buffs, and our numbers will not be diminished by Harold Clurman's sensitive mounting of it, will find A Touch of the Poet a poignant piece of theatre.

"Poignant" has been a bad word ever since Walter Winchell found theatrical producers would quote him in their advertisements if he used it. Yet it's hard to describe this drama, which treads the edge of melodrama with such sure steps, in any other way. People have come to expect from O'Neill the thundering savagery of fallen men in conflict with themselves. But A Touch of the Poet belongs to two women and their story is a fragile one.

The wife and daugher of Cornelius Melody, the dispossessed Irish nobleman who finds himself washed ashore in America with only his pride, are simple folk whose love is such a habit it becomes part of them. For Nora Melody, superbly played by Helen Hayes, her husband is the same grand man who plucked her from amongst the pigs and made her his wife. Her love reaches past respect, for in Melody's rowdy pretense there is little to respect. She is as blind to his failure as she is to any threat to her love of him.

And daughter Sara, portrayed with grace by Kim Stanley, grows in love only when she can decide his fault, which she so clearly sees, is extraneous to that love. She despairs when her father comes at last to see himself as he is, then agrees with her simple mother that the vanished hero dwelt only in the mind and let it be. These are two great women.

Cornelius Melody is a rather transparent figure. For almost the entire play he represents the tiresome eccentric whose world is only in himself. When he takes his tumble, he's off stage, which is a good thing because he doesn't grab anything away from the women. He seems the least ambiguous character of the play and is ably, if not entirely audibly, portrayed by Eric Portman.

As a prospective mother-in-law for Sara Melody, Betty Field is amusing enough but never really very necessary. Her role reveals how unpolished much of this sprawling piece is.

There are standard gripes you can make: A Touch of the Poet is long, unwieldy, even dull at times. But it is O'Neill no matter and a stunning array of talent. There is no mistaking that.