Symons at the Seaside

The poet, critic and short story writer Arthur Symons (1865–1945) was an inveterate traveller who wrote frequently about the Channel and the North Cornish coasts in poetry and prose. During the 1890s and 1900s, he was at the forefront of the pre-modernist avant-garde, and was an important conduit for the dissemination of decadent and impressionist art in England. As a landscape writer, he blended the quasi-Impressionist methods of painters such as Whistler with the decadent’s concern with the privileged subjectivity of the artist. This chapter examines the implications of such practices for his treatment of Cornwall, Sussex and Dieppe – including in neglected later writings such as ‘Sea Magic’ (1920).