Well @-@ known poets of the Edwardian era of the 1890s , such as Alfred Austin , Stephen Phillips , and William Watson , had been working very much in the shadow of Tennyson , producing weak imitations of the poetry of the Victorian era . They continued to work in this vein into the early years of the 20th century . As the new century opened , Austin was still the serving British Poet Laureate , a post which he held up to 1913 . In the century 's first decade , poetry still had a large audience ; volumes of verse published in that time included Thomas Hardy 's The Dynasts , Christina Rossetti 's posthumous Poetical Works , Ernest Dowson 's Poems , George Meredith 's Last Poems , Robert Service 's Ballads of a Cheechako and John Masefield 's Ballads and Poems . Future Nobel Prize winner William Butler Yeats was devoting much of his energy to the Abbey Theatre and writing for the stage , producing relatively little lyric poetry during this period . In 1907 , the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Rudyard Kipling .