Feng, it seems, was the original of Shakespeare's Claudius, and [John Wain's Feng] takes him as the protagonist of the Hamlet drama…. Feng's inner life, such as it is, remains strikingly tedious; he comes through in his prose-monologues as a garrulous bore. Nothing in the poem really comes alive: it's a savage, violent society and a harrowing plot, but all this is curiously tamed and toned down, filtered through a sensibility too equable, domesticated and undramatic to be adequate to the turbulent demands of the subject-matter. When Wain writes 'I felt their needs drawn through my flesh like wires', it's difficult to believe that he really feels it, anywhere below the cranium. The theme of the poem is POWER (its capitals)—power in that abstract sense characteristic of bourgeois liberalism. Wain seems to dislike POWER, although it's not clear what he feels about the power propping up the society which permits liberals like himself to protest against POWER. (pp. 78-9)
Terry Eagleton, in Stand (copyright © by Stand), Vol. 17, No. 1 (1975–76).
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