Hirst came to prominence upon his curation of Freeze in 1988 while studying art at Goldsmiths, an exhibition including his own work in addition to that of his peers. As a result of the exhibition, Hirst caught the attention of art collector Charles Saatchi, who financed the artist’s revolutionary 1991 The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. This work consists of a display case containing a dead shark preserved in formaldehyde in order to speak to the fragility of life. Butterflies also offer a viable way for the artist to explore this interest; as such, they are a recurrent iconography in the artist’s oeuvre.

Butterflies appear as early as 1991 in his installation In and Out of Love wherein they hatched from pupae attached to canvases and flew around the room until their deaths, functioning as a powerful microcosm of our own life cycles. Hirst also used their wings in his Kaleidoscope paintings, arranging them in a fashion deliberately intended to recall the Christian tradition of stained-glass windows. Almost concurrently with the creation of Love Poems, they also appeared in his Entomology paintings and cabinets; Hirst featured butterflies alongside other colored insects in these works as a reflection on their paradoxically beautiful appearance even in death. In the case of these prints, they are suggestive of the transience of both life and love. While some might surmise his works with butterflies to be morbid, to the contrary, Hirst has said: “I’ve got an obsession with death...But I think it’s like a celebration of life rather than some- thing morbid,” a sensibility most evident in Love Poems.