Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, published in September 1962, documented the devastating environmental effects of pesticides such as DDT, which had been deployed to control insect pests including disease-carrying mosquitoes and agricultural insects. Carson wrote in vivid, scientifically rigorous prose that was simultaneously a work of literary art and a political intervention. The book helped galvanise the environmental movement, led to the ban on agricultural DDT in the United States, and is credited with inspiring the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Silent Spring transformed the literary status of insects — and by extension human parasites — in the second half of the twentieth century. Carson's argument that insects, however troubling to human beings, were essential components of ecological webs that humans destroyed at their peril gave new intellectual seriousness to nature poetry focused on the insect world. Poets from Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry to Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney all engaged with the ecological consciousness that Carson helped define, and the insect poem took on a new urgency in the decades after Silent Spring.