The celebrated artist David Hockney, who has died at the age of 88, produced a number of works in response to poetry. In 1961, his We Two Boys Together Clinging, completed towards the end of his second year at the Royal College of Art at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in England, takes its imagery from a poem by the 19th-century American writer, Walt Whitman. The Arts Council Collection website says that two lines of the poem have been scribbled on the right-hand side of the, which also references a newspaper clipping detailing a climbing accident ('Two Boys Cling to Cliff all Night'), which Hockney interpreted as an allusion to his pop idol Cliff Richard.

In 1966 he produced Illustrations for Fourteen Poems from CP Cavafy. According to the David Hockney Foundation, the images are “mostly delicate line drawings of intimates scenes between men”. Hockney was an admirer of the Greek-Egyptian poet Cavafy “in particular for his vivid, unapologetic evocations of homosexual desire”. He is quoted as saying: “Of course, Cavafy’s poems are about gay love, and I was quite boldly using that subject then. I was aware that it was illegal, but I didn’t really think much about that at the time. I was living in a bohemian world, where we just did what we pleased. I wasn’t speaking for anyone else. I was defending my way of living.”

In 1977, his Blue Guitar etchings were inspired by the American poet Wallace Stevens, who wrote the 1937 book-length poem ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’. Stevens himself was inspired by Picasso’s The Old Guitarist. Hockney is quoted as saying: “When I first read ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’, I wasn’t quite sure what it was about, like all poems like that, but I loved the rhythms in it, and some of the imagery, just the choice of words is marvellous. Then, when I read it out loud, I loved it even more, because I got the music that it has.

“The etching themselves weren’t conceived as literal illustrations of the poem, but as an interpretation of its themes in visual terms.”