Animals have often provided Romantic writers with important images. Blake's tiger and Melville's whale are both used to focus on the awesome and ambiguous energies at the heart of creation. Insects, too, have often been invoked for the purposes of emulation or identification. Words-worth gathers visual pleasures ‘like a bee among the flowers’; Emerson admires the ‘Humble-Bee’ in his ‘sunny solitudes’:

Emily Dickinson cries ‘Oh, for a bee's experience / Of clovers and of noon’; Rilke writes ‘We are the bees of the Invisible. Nous butinons éperdument le miel du Visible pour l'accumuler dans la grande ruche d'or de l'invisible.’ It is an attractive and understandable image for any Romantic writer who seeks to assimilate the pollen of perception in order to transmute it into the honey of his art. But more unusual perhaps is the attraction which the spider has held for American writers from Jonathan Edwards to Robert Lowell. Thus Edwards starts one of his earliest pieces of writing, ‘Of Insects’: ‘Of all Insects no one is more wonderfull than the Spider especially with Respect to their sagacity and admirable way of working.’ Edwards was particularly struck to see spiders apparently ‘swimming in the air’ (like Emerson's bee), and he describes how he watched and experimented to see how they managed to sustain themselves in space.