Mary Oliver, who won the Pulitzer Prize for American Primitive (1984) and became one of the most widely read American poets of the late twentieth century, built her entire poetic practice on intense, concentrated observation of the natural world, including its insects and smallest creatures. Her poems on grasshoppers, flies, mosquitoes, and crawling creatures bring the full weight of poetic attention to bear on creatures that most humans dismiss or seek to destroy. Oliver's work reaches the broadest popular audience of any ecological poetry in the American tradition.

Oliver's insect poems represent the most widely read continuation of the Burns-Hardy-Lawrence tradition of taking overlooked or despised creatures seriously as subjects for lyric attention. Her poem 'The Summer Day,' which ends with the famous question 'Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?' opens with minute observation of a grasshopper cleaning her face — locating the deepest human question in the observation of an insect. Oliver's work proved that insect and parasite verse could speak to a mass popular audience if it found the right balance of attention and meaning.