Ted Hughes, whose poetry consistently engaged with the violence and vitality of the natural world, wrote about insects including mosquitoes, flies, and various predatory creatures in his collections Crow (1970) and subsequent volumes. Hughes's insect poems inherit the Lawrentian tradition of the insect as a figure for primal life-force — amoral, intense, and indifferent to human comfort. His ecological vision, which saw predation and parasitism as essential aspects of the living world rather than aberrations from some benign norm, transformed British nature poetry.

Hughes's treatment of insects and blood-drinking creatures in his poetry helped establish a tradition of ecological verse that refused to sentimentalise the natural world. His influence on subsequent British and American nature poetry was enormous, and his insistence that the poet must be willing to inhabit the perspective of the predator and the parasite — not merely observe them from a safe distance — pushed the tradition of insect poetry in a more challenging direction. Hughes, along with Lawrence and Heaney, forms the backbone of the English language's great tradition of insect verse.