Jim Morrison, the famous rock musician, is buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. The same cemetery that artistic greats Frédéric Chopin, Édith Piaf, Oscar Wilde, and Georges Méliès are buried in.
I had an English teacher in high school who visited the cemetery while in Paris and she said that there was some debate as to if Jim Morrison should be buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery. According to her, Morrison's lyrics were given out to the people of Paris and they were asked if it was poetic enough and they said yes.
Is this true? Did anything like this ever happen?
No, this definitely did not happen.
When Jim Morrison died in Paris in July 1971, the people he was closest to in Paris, who were essentially in charge of his funeral and burial, were Pamela Courson, his (American) partner, and Alain Ronay.
For context, Ronay was French but had studied film at UCLA with Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek, and seems to have been one of Morrison's closest friends. When Morrison came to Paris, Ronay was very useful to him as a local who was connected to the French film scene, and so who had enough connections and local knowledge to get things done.
As far as I can tell, based on reading the biographies Break On Through: The Life And Death Of Jim Morrison and Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend by Stephen Davis (two relatively sober and well-researched biographies of Morrison aimed at a popular audience), it was Ronay who seems to have pulled the strings that enabled Jim Morrison to get buried at Père Lachaise. The decision to have Morrison buried there occurred before there was any public knowledge that Morrison had died, as Ronay and Courson were very careful to keep news of Morrison's death as quiet as possible, wanting to avoid the intrusive media event that was otherwise inevitable - so there certainly was no public judgement of Morrison's poetry. Ronay used his connections (and those of Agnes Varda, another well-connected Parisian Morrison friend, who I discuss more in this old answer) to keep news of the death quiet, and claims to have been the one to have convinced the person in charge at Père Lachaise to let Morrison into the cemetery. According to Break On Through:
Pam originally wanted him cremated and I said, 'No, don't cremate him . . . let's bury him at Père-Lachaise.' It just seemed like the thing to do. I was in a state of shock myself, but it seemed to me that it would've been what he wanted. I got him into Père-Lachaise. There are no spaces left and at the time getting a foreigner buried there was not a particularly easy thing to do. While I can't reveal the details, it didn't prove to be an enormous hurdle, though, and I was even able to choose between two spaces."
According to the Stephen Davis book:
Ronay told Pamela about Père Lachaise, and suggested they try to bury Jim there, near Chopin, Sarah Bernhardt, Molière, or Claude Debussy. This seemed reasonable to her...
Ronay walked across the river and found the house of Bigot, the undertaker, in the shadows of the twin spires of Notre Dame Cathedral, where the old monastic cloister had once stood. Mr. Guirard, the director, explained that everyone wanted to rest in Père Lachaise, and there were very few spaces left. Ronay pleaded that Douglas Morrison had been a famous young American writer. Guirard brightened. “A writer? I know a space— in Division Eighty-nine, very close to another famous writer—Mr. Oscar Wilde.”
Ronay was shocked. “No, I beg you, not next to Oscar Wilde! Please— can you find another space?” A small double plot was found, near a memorial to victims of Nazi oppression in Paris, in a less desirable location on the other side of the hill. The funeral was arranged for Wednesday morning, July 7.
The account in both books is also similar to an article Ronay wrote in French about Morrison's last days in Paris Match in 1991; I would guess that the Break On Through biographers talked to Ronay (and Break On Through does thank Ronay in the acknowledgements for his help), and their account is based on a separate interview, while Stephen Davis used the Paris Match article as a source.
So to reiterate - Morrison's body was in the ground before the public found out that he was dead - there was no public judgement of his poetry.