A yahoo answers compares this poet to Keats. What do you think?

Question

A yahoo answers compares this poet to keats. What do you think
This answer states
commenting upon "la belle dames sans merci"
To each his own! I think I'll stay with Keats. His "elfin grot" is the height of the depths. Dean, from his prose works, appears to be a master of meaninglessness. His "disco underground" may be the depths at its height. A story of OOOOOOOOO!

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Answer 1

OK, last time I tried to respond to you politely, in an understated, slightly subtle way. Apparently you didn't hear me. So this time I'll live up to my name and be brutally frank.

Why do you keep advertising this junk?

Erotica? Maybe, but second rate. No, third rate. Probably based on daydreams and cheap reading, rather than real experience! Erotica itself has high-art aspirations, differentiating it from commercial pornography. But never mind. That's another issue.

Poetry? Definitely not. However one defines poetry, it uses language in an artistic way. Not just wordiness, repetition, cliches, banality, self-indulgence, imprecision, carelessness, inaccuracy (of diction, usage, and grammar), insensitivity, name-calling, adolescent exaggeration, and the like.

Explicitly erotic poetry probably can also be poetic. This just isn't.

But poetry can be beautifully and genuinely erotic without being explicit.

To be precise, I did not impose a comparison of Dean with Keats. Dean borrowed the title (mispelled) from Keats and, hence, suggested an allusion. It's just that the "disco underground," which never came alive, also never came close to the suggestiveness, earthiness, sensuality, and sensibility of Keats' original.

Keats' language makes a subtle shift from the I-dominant stanzas to the she-dominant stanzas. From the male dominance of the I-clauses (I met a lady, I made a garland . . . and fragrant zone, I set her on my pacing steed) he gradually moves to the male-surrender in the she-clauses (she look'd at me as she did love / And made sweet moan, would she bend, she found me roots, sure in language strange she said, she took me to her elfin grot), and finally to the mutual self-surrender and tenderness (she wept and sigh'd full sore, I shut her wild, wild eyes / With kisses four). With such deliberate and artistic use of language, the lovers are seen to rise to a genuine climax of the loss of self in another self, from foreplay all the way to afterglow.

That is erotic.

Those sweet moans and that pacing steed, roots of relish and language strange--well, Keats doesn't have to be explicit. That imagery lifts the reader up right along with the lovers, heightening the experience.

But whether the language is explicit or not, the language has to be artistic for verse to be poetry. It must rise to the heights, rather than simply wallow in the depths if it is to be poetry.

So ask good questions about erotica (or poetry, or both) as long as you like. But don't continue simply advertising this one site as it it were something special.

It ain't.