Patrick Kavanagh's long poem 'The Great Hunger' (1942) depicted the grinding poverty, sexual repression, and spiritual desolation of rural Irish farming life in the mid-twentieth century. While it references the Great Famine in its title, it is set in Kavanagh's own era and deals with actual contemporary poverty, in which insect infestation — fleas, lice, and the general vermin of poverty — was part of the background of rural deprivation. The poem caused a scandal in Ireland and was briefly suppressed.

Kavanagh's poem insisted on depicting the bodily realities of poverty — including the insect-infested world of the rural poor — at a time when Irish cultural nationalism preferred idealized images of the peasantry. By connecting the tradition of famine poetry to the contemporary experience of rural deprivation, Kavanagh placed the insect and parasite once again in the service of social protest poetry. His influence on Seamus Heaney, who also wrote unflinchingly about agricultural and bodily realities, was profound and lasting.