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.

– Walt Whitman, from #5, “Song of Myself,” Leaves of Grass

Whitman is talking about his soul in this passage, not a lover, and it is an excellent example of the blatant eroticism he applies to different aspects of human and American life.

During his introduction to Whitman, our professor told us about a graduate seminar he attended with a few other graduate students. They each had to present on one subject of the seminar and one (un)lucky female student drew Leaves of Grass. He remembered her name—it was something silly and innocent-sounding like Emily Bateman. She’d never encountered Whitman before and it must have swept her up. She breathlessly began her presentation with this memorable phrase: “Have you ever been fucked by a poem?!”

Oh, Emily Bateman.