Poet, writer and music legend Patti Smith first read Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis as a teenager, since when she has cited the writer in performances and listed his books amongst her favourites. In 1989, similarly separated from someone she loved, Smith wrote in a letter to artist Robert Mapplethorpe, “You drew me from the darkest period of my young life,” so composing an uncanny parallel with the title of Wilde’s letter, which translates from the Latin as “from the depths”.