Sonnet to an Asshole

The Idol—Sonnet to an Asshole is a poem written by Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine in 1871. The sonnet is both a celebration of the human anus and a parody of the fetishization of the female body by Albert Mérat and other Parnassian poets. It pushed the limits "not only of acceptable poetic and social behavior, but of French verse in its formal intelligibility too."
Rimbaud and Verlaine were lovers, regarded by scholars as the first openly gay couple in modern literary history. Verlaine composed the sonnet's first eight lines and Rimbaud wrote the last six. The poem was published in the ''Album Zutique.''