There is a particular strain of English painting that springs from poetry: the work of William Blake is the most obvious example, but other English painters have had lyrical streaks. Turner used to caption his paintings with his own verses, and in the modern era Paul Nash (1889-1946) kept up the poetic tradition.

The early drawings introducing Tate Britain’s new retrospective Paul Nash (until 5 March) were nearly all inspired by poetry: the Blakean spirit beings doing battle in The Combat (1910) were drawn for Nash’s poet friend Gordon Bottomley, and the Rossetti-esque Our Lady of Inspiration accompanied a book of poems of Sybil Fountain. But figure drawing was never Nash’s strong point, and the “dreaming trees” that inspired his own youthful poetry soon became the principal subjects of his work.