Federico Garcia Lorca, the great Spanish poet and playwright, wrote poems saturated with insects — flies, wasps, mosquitoes, and crawling creatures — as part of a broader poetics that embraced death, the body, and the dark earth. His theory of duende, articulated in a famous 1933 lecture, situated the source of true artistic inspiration in the awareness of death and bodily mortality — a mortality in which insects and worms played their essential role. Lorca was shot by Nationalist forces in August 1936, and his death became one of the defining literary tragedies of the Spanish Civil War.

Lorca's insect imagery, rooted in Andalusian landscape and folklore, gave the Spanish and Latin American poetic traditions a distinctive treatment of the insect as an element of the duende — the dark, death-aware life-force that he considered the mark of authentic art. His influence on Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, and subsequent generations of Spanish-language poets was enormous, and his concept of duende provided a theoretical framework for understanding why insects and parasites — creatures that live by consuming living flesh — have so persistently attracted poets across cultures and centuries.