Seamus Heaney's debut collection Death of a Naturalist (1966) established him as a major new voice in Irish and British poetry through its unflinching engagement with the physical world of rural Ulster, including frogs, flax-rotting, and the teeming insect life of the countryside. The title poem concerns a childhood fascination with frogspawn that turns to revulsion when the child encounters the adult frogs in overwhelming, threatening numbers. The collection's sensory attention to the natural world — including its parasitic and threatening elements — was immediately recognised as something new.

Heaney's early poetry drew directly on the Kavanagh tradition of unflinching attention to rural bodily and natural reality, including the insect world in all its fecundity and menace. His career-long engagement with the landscape, including its creatures and parasites, placed him in a line descending from Burns through Hardy and Lawrence. 'Death of a Naturalist' showed that insects and crawling creatures could be the subject of serious lyric art, and its influence on subsequent Irish and British nature poetry has been enormous.