In poems of Robert Frost and in O'Neill's play The Hairy Ape, the picture of human experience is one of alienation, desperation, powerlessness, and solitude in an unforgiving environment. The most they can do is attempt to cope with unaccommodating circumstance, diminishing but not eliminating their discomfort and incapable of positive heroism.
O'Neill's Hairy Ape transforms characters' mastery of one little corner of the universe into utter helplessness. Emboldened by the spunk and arrogance of privilege and ignorance, Mildred expects to find the liner's boiler room colorful, but she withers in the presence of the animalistic reality in which brute strength is the highest and best attribute. The play's stage directions describe her brief encounter with Yank's domain as one in which she fnds her "personality crushed, beaten in, collapsed, by the terrific impact of this unknown, abysmal brutality, naked and shameless" (33). Meanwhile, the image of Yank as Rodan's sculpture The Thinker is a metaphor of viciously humorous irony that establishes the theme of alienation: "Aw say, youse guys. Lemme alone. Can't youse see I'm tryin' to tink?" (O'Neill 38). Yank does indeed try to think his way out, as if entering Mildred's universe were a real possibility, but he is equally alien in the complicated world of capitalist and IWW agendas. Ironies multiply as Yank makes his way to the zoo, where it turns out he is not gorilla enough to survive the "murderous hug" of the real animal: " Even him didn't tink I belonged," the dying Yank says. "Christ, where do I get off at? Where do I fit in?" (87).
Alienation is also a theme that Frost repeatedly turns to. The short poem "Fire and Ice" captures the big picture of that idea. Favoring fire to end the world can be interpreted as a desperate longing for engagement, or "desire" (line 3), even the kind that brings on the end of the world, which, to paraphrase Shakespeare, as it kisses, consumes. Yet ...