ON Margate Sands./I can connect/ Nothing with nothing.’ Thomas Stearns (T. S.) Eliot crafted these short lines that form a part of his fractured epic The Waste Land in October 1921, as he sat in the inauspicious Nayland Rock Shelter (granted Grade II-listed status in 2009) on the promenade of the Kent seaside resort.
The American poet was struggling to write, battling with the pressures of a taxing marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood, and had recently endured a tense family visit that saw his ageing mother, Charlotte, travel to England from America. He was living on his nerves, quite likely suffering from a nervous breakdown or, as he later stated, from ‘aboulie’—consequently, he was about to be granted a three-month
