Rudyard Kipling (1895), often voted Britain's favourite poem
Nonsense verse, such as by Edward Lear, taken with the work of Lewis Carroll, is regarded as a precursor of surrealism. Writers of comic verse included W. S. Gilbert, who produced the Bab Ballads and the lyrics for the Savoy Operas.
Towards the end of the century, English poets began to take an interest in French Symbolism and Victorian poetry entered a decadent fin-de-siècle phase. Two groups of poets emerged, the Yellow Book poets who adhered to the tenets of Aestheticism, including Algernon Charles Swinburne, Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons and the Rhymer's Club group that included Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson and William Butler Yeats. Poetry of A. E. Housman consisting of wistful evocation of doomed youth in the English countryside, grew in popularity in early 20th century.
Oscar Wilde, 1882 In the 19th century, the Irish playwright Dion Boucicault was an extremely popular writer of comedies. However, it was in the last decade of the century that the Irish theatre finally came of age with the emergence of George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. All of these writers lived mainly in England and wrote in English, with the exception of some works in French by Wilde.
The Celtic Revival (c. 1890), was begun by William Butler Yeats, Augusta, Lady Gregory, John Millington Synge, Seán O'Casey, James Joyce and others. The Revival stimulated new appreciation of traditional Irish literature. The movement also encouraged the creation of works written in the spirit of Irish culture, as distinct from British culture.
D. H. Lawrence, 1906 Important novelists between the two World Wars include Irish writer James Joyce, alongside English authors D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, C. S. Forester and P. G. Wodehouse
Joyce's complex works included Ulysses, arguably the most important work of Modernist literature, that is referred to as "a demonstration and summation of the entire movement". It is an interpretation of the Odyssey set in Dublin, and culminates in Finnegans Wake
