I'm shocked by the indecency of "The Imperfect Enjoymen

Here is the poem:

Naked she lay, clasped in my longing arms,
I filled with love, and she all over charms;
Both equally inspired with eager fire,
Melting through kindness, flaming in desire.
With arms, legs, lips close clinging to embrace, [5]
She clips me to her breast, and sucks me to her face.
Her nimble tongue, Love's lesser lightening, played
Within my mouth, and to my thoughts conveyed
Swift orders that I should prepare to throw
The all-dissolving thunderbolt below. [10]
My fluttering soul, sprung with the painted kiss,
Hangs hovering o'er her balmy brinks of bliss.
But whilst her busy hand would guide that part
Which should convey my soul up to her heart,
In liquid raptures I dissolve all o'er, [15]
Melt into sperm, and spend at every pore.
A touch from any part of her had done't:
Her hand, her foot, her very look's a cunt.

Smiling, she chides in a kind murmuring noise,
And from her body wipes the clammy joys, [20]
When, with a thousand kisses wandering o'er
My panting bosom, "Is there then no more?"
She cries. "All this to love and rapture's due;
Must we not pay a debt to pleasure too?"

But I, the most forlorn, lost man alive, [25]
To show my wished obedience vainly strive:
I sigh, alas! and kiss, but cannot swive.
Eager desires confound my first intent,
Succeeding shame does more success prevent,
And rage at last confirms me impotent. [30]
Ev'n her fair hand, which might bid heat return
To frozen age, and make cold hermits burn,
Applied to my dead cinder, warms no more
Than fire to ashes could past flames restore.
Trembling, confused, despairing, limber, dry, [35]
A wishing, weak, unmoving lump I lie.
This dart of love, whose piercing point, oft tried,
With virgin blood ten thousand maids have dyed;
Which nature still directed with such art
That it through every cunt reached every heart — [40]
Stiffly resolved, 'twould carelessly invade
Woman or man, nor aught its fury stayed:
Where'er it pierced, a cunt it found or made —
Now languid lies in this unhappy hour,
Shrunk up and sapless like a withered flower. [45]

Thou treacherous, base deserter of my flame,
False to my passion, fatal to my fame,
Through what mistaken magic dost thou prove
So true to lewdness, so untrue to love?
What oyster-cinder-beggar-common whore [50]
Didst thou e'er fail in all thy life before?
When vice, disease, and scandal lead the way,
With what officious haste dost thou obey!
Like a rude, roaring hector in the streets
Who scuffles, cuffs, and justles all he meets, [55]
But if his king or country claim his aid,
The rakehell villain shrinks and hides his head;
Ev'n so thy brutal valour is displayed,
Breaks every stew, does each small whore invade,
But when great Love the onset does command, [60]
Base recreant to thy prince, thou dar'st not stand.
Worst part of me, and henceforth hated most,
Through all the town a common fucking-post,
On whom each whore relieves her tingling cunt
As hogs do rub themselves on gates and grunt, [65]
May'st thou to ravenous chancres be a prey,
Or in consuming weepings waste away;
May strangury and stone thy days attend;
May'st thou ne'er piss, who did refuse to spend
When all my joys did on false thee depend. [70]

And may ten thousand abler pricks agree
To do the wronged Corinna right for thee.

http://ethnicity.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/imperfect.html
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OMG! What do you make of this?!

What? Who cares? You can write whatever you want in English.

lol wut

Celestine: I am shocked at how bad the writing is. This, by no means, is the first or only dirty poem.

Wintereis, you got something better to offer?

It isn't "dirty"; it isn't "bad"; it isn't "shocking". It's fairly normal Restoration verse.

If you're so shocked by it, why are you spreading it around for the rest of us to read it? Just ignore it and move on to the next one.

<<Celestine: I am shocked at how bad the writing is.>>

It's a whole heck of a lot better than most of us could write

(Disclaimer -- I read only a few snippets of this.)

<<Celestine: I am shocked at how bad the writing is. This, by no means, is the first or only dirty poem. >>


How exactly is the writing bad? All writing is subjective.

Do you REALLY think all writing is subjective?

That there is no qualitative difference between Robert Frost and a freshman English paper? Between the creative, disciplined writing behind great drama, and Kevin Federline's lyrics?

I may be wasting a comment, but it's ridiculous to suggest there are no clear guidlines or rules governing good writing. That a yammering drunk in a bar is just as profound as authors whose disciplined art and skill can make us feel every emotion.

Stop listening to your "liberal" college professors and the egalitarian atruist liars, and read "On Writing" by William Zinsser and "Story" by Robert McKee. Knowledge is possible. There are clear, knowable rules and guidelines governing the structure and fundamentals of writing and storytelling, and how to evaluate and judge writing.

Ok, not ALL writing is subjective.

But the whole point of that obvious hyperbole was: where is your evidence that that poem is not well written? I thought it was good.

Here's a poem by Wintereis:


<<Binary Refraction, 1:24 A.M. November 15



Outside my bedroom window, the American city:

a gutter-wash of pornographic magazines

stutters its endless celluloid in a death rattle of pages.



And in the dark: his nylon jacket, open fly,

the jolt of flesh held between palm and four fingers—

Chaos stands outside my window,

leaves his pale tracers in the dark hours of morning.



Fear and pleasure: our faces in shadow

disclose themselves through transparent plains.

One overlays another, and the glass' structure,

a constant flux, moves Chaos to order.



At night my bedroom window is a thin veneer,

a molecular lattice that puddles in its casement.

These are the open and diminish of emblems

sustained by anode and cathode.



I wonder, shifting in the silence,

how long have I lain here,

how long have I looked in at myself as another?>>



Not so much better than "The Imperfect Enjoymen". At least, there is a lot more pseudo-intellectual "BS" going on.

<<Naked she lay, clasped in my longing arms,
I filled with love, and she all over charms;
Both equally inspired with eager fire,
Melting through kindness, flaming in desire.
With arms, legs, lips close clinging to embrace, [5]
She clips me to her breast, and sucks me to her face.
Her nimble tongue, Love's lesser lightening, played
Within my mouth, and to my thoughts conveyed
Swift orders that I should prepare to throw
The all-dissolving thunderbolt below. [10]
My fluttering soul, sprung with the painted kiss,
Hangs hovering o'er her balmy brinks of bliss.
But whilst her busy hand would guide that part
Which should convey my soul up to her heart,
In liquid raptures I dissolve all o'er, [15]
Melt into sperm, and spend at every pore.
A touch from any part of her had done't:
Her hand, her foot, her very look's a cunt.>>

There is no depth to this poem. It is all surface. There are no philosophical points, nothing to get at the more important aspects of the human condition. It was written to shock its contemporaries, not to inspire them or provide insight. These are not absolutely necessary to a piece of literature, but they do go a very long way toward creating a quality piece.

The writing was clichéd even in its own time: "inspired with eager fire, /Melting through kindness, flaming in desire".

He mixes metaphor or holds on to a metaphor only long enough to drop it for another, never using it or developing it for any other purpose. Such is the case when he switches suddenly from the fire metaphor to the thunder/lightening metaphor. Perhaps he should pick which clichéd force of nature he wants to use. Is she striking like a thunderbolt or smoldering like an ember?

He has very poor verb choice: "clips me to her breast, and sucks me to her face". One sounds like she has managed to put a notebook clip around his entire body and her nipple. The other sounds like she is some kind of vacuum . . . and he hasn't even gotten to penetration yet.

He has a child's use of alliteration, using it far too often, typically with little purpose, and far too obviously: "legs, lips close clinging", "Love's lesser lightening", "balmy brinks of bliss", "soul, sprung".

His use of rhyme is also obvious and overburdened even for formalism: "inspired, fire, desire". Do you really need an internal slant rhyme and a rhyming couplet, really?

And this is only the first stanza.


No, writing is not subjective. There are actually tools to the trade. I have been twice awarded with the Woods Prize for poetry. I have also worked as a content editor for one of the oldest and one of the most prestigious literary journals in the United States. And while I hold no conceit about my writing or my editing, I know enough to realize what is drivel. If I had received "The Imperfect Enjoyment" at that journal, I would not have even allowed it to pass on to a second reading. The reason why it is preserved for posterity is because of John Wilmot’s ability to shock seventeenth-century society, not for its innate quality. Shakespeare would not be a household name if he had written so poorly.

Bitch said: Wintereis, you got something better to offer?

Anais Nin: (translated) "Bijou felt heavy and drowsy, but not unconscious. Her eyelids felt heavy, and she could not make the effort to open her eyes. But she felt her dress so lightly lifted that she could not be certain. It could have been a breeze. Lifted by a breeze. No human touch. The air was lifting her skirt it seemed, and exposing her silk-clad legs. Where the stockings ended, she felt a light touch. As if a feather had been brushed against her skin. The touch was so light that it was as if the skin had a thousand tiny eyes and the touch had lifted their eyelids, and light and heat fell upon them, waves, currents, vibrations of response. Each tiny cell instead of contracting at the touch, expanded and became twice as sensitive. She never moved. Her deepest fear was that the hand should stop, grow timid, withdraw. She wanted to move, so as to place a leg a little more sideways, separate from the other so that the fingers could reach the inner skin which was more sensitive than the skin of the thighs.
The skin of her eyelids was invaded with a reddish sunset light. It was as if the skin cells had carried red wine, first to her eyes, and then through her neck down to her breasts. The tips of the breasts acknowledged the current of warmth. It could not be a man's hand. It must be silk, a feather, the hair of a soft animal like a rabbit. How slowly it worked its way upward, as if knowing it must wait for all the little cells to awaken, and follow, cumulatively aroused, and like rivulets, foaming toward the center, the edge of small waves of pleasure adding one to the other , increasing as the hand reached a softer and softer skin.

Woman's pearl was the center of this electrical storm, a hushed storm, whirling, wrapped in cotton but incandescent, streaks of lightening, the flesh becoming a lightening conductor, iridescent with light, striking gongs of pleasure; one, two, three."
This is not from the erotic story The Basque and Bijou, but an entry from the diary vol. 3, 1939-1944, page 58."


or Henry Miller:

http://books.google.com/books?id=xXq99FasvW8C&dq=henry+miller+tropic+of+cancer&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=Mro2S_vuJI7mswOO8snLBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CBsQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=&f=false


or Whitman:

The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the
distillation, it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

The smoke of my own breath,
Echoes, ripples, buzz'd whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and
vine,
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing
of blood and air through my lungs . . .

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of
all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions
of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look
through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in
books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self. . .

5
I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to
you,
And you must not be abased to the other.

Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not
even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn'd over
upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue
to my bare-stript heart,
And reach'd till you felt my beard, and reach'd till you held my
feet.


or Hart Crane:

Infinite consanguinity it bears
This tendered theme of you that light
Retrieves from sea plains where the sky
Resigns a breast that every wave enthrones;
While ribboned water lanes I wind
Are laved and scattered with no stroke
Wide from your side, whereto this hour
The sea lifts, also, reliquary hands.

And so, admitted through black swollen gates
That must arrest all distance otherwise,
Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments,
Light wrestling there incessantly with light,
Star kissing star through wave on wave unto
Your body rocking!


or

Whitman again:

Not the heat flames up and consumes,
Not the sea-waves hurry in and out,
Not the air, delicious and dry, the air of
the ripe summer, bears lightly along
white down-balls of myriads of seeds,
wafted, sailing gracefully, to drop
where they may,
Not these—O none of these, more than the
flames of me, consuming, burning for
his love whom I love—O none, more
than I, hurrying in and out;
Does the tide hurry, seeking something, and
never give up?—O I, the same, to
seek my life-long lover;
O nor down-balls, nor perfumes, nor the high
rain-emitting clouds, are borne through
the open air, more than my copious
soul is borne through the open air,
wafted in all directions, for friendship,
for love.—


etc. etc. etc.

Also,

Allen Ginsberg atualiza sentimentos em san josé, 1954:

i’ll go into the bedroom silently and lie down between the bridegroom and
the bride, /
those bodies fallen from heaven stretched out waiting naked and restless, /
arms resting over their eyes in the darkness, /
bury my face in their shoulders and breasts, breathing their skin, and stroke and kiss neck and mouth and make back be open and known, /
legs raised up crook’d to receive, cock in the darkness driven tormented and attacking /
roused up from hole to itching head, /
bodies locked shuddering naked, hot hips and buttocks screwed into each other /
and eyes, eyes glinting and charming, widening into looks and abandon, /
and moans of movement, voices, hands in air, hands between thighs, hands in moisture on softened lips, throbbing contraction of bellies till the white come flow in the swirling sheets, /
and the bride cry for forgiveness, and the groom be covered with tears of passion and compassion, /
and i rise up from the bed replenished with last intimate gestures and kisses of farewell – /
all before the mind wakes, behind shades and closed doors in a darkened house /
where the inhabitants roam unsatisfied in the night, nude ghosts seeking each other out in the silence.