The landscape of the 1890-1930 literary period had a very different look at the time than it does in retrospect.
After the death of Tennyson, the office of the Poet Laureate in the United Kingdom was occupied by a series of authors who, while hugely significant in their own time, command virtually no attention now. The office was occupied by only three men during the period running from 1896 to 1967, and the collapse of their respective reputations grows more and more severe with each succeeding appointment.
Alfred Austin, who served from 1896 to 1913, is not totally forgotten; so too is Robert Bridges, for the most part, who served from 1913 to 1930 and who is now mostly remembered for Testament of Beauty (1929) -- which is not exactly saying much to begin with. Indeed, he seems now most often to come up in connection with his work in preserving and bringing to print the poetry of the 19th C. Jesuit Gerald Manley Hopkins, who might also be a good candidate for this list. John Masefield is the one who vexes me the most, however; he was held the Laureateship from 1930 through 1967, which is an absurdly long time, and is now entirely forgotten in a popular sense in spite of being one of the most prolific and respected poets, dramatists and novelists of his time. His work has a very old-fashioned feel to it, when looked at from today's perspective, and his consistent focus on seafaring content has not served him well in leaving a diverse legacy. I think he's great, myself, but I am prepared to think so alone.
We might also consider the case of Sir Henry Newbolt, who was titanically influential in the poetry world during the early twentieth century -- especially when it came to giving support to new poets who would soon find their feet. In spite of being quite prolific and very well-liked at the height of his career, his name lingers on today pretty much solely as the author of Vitaï Lampada -- and this memory is not exactly a salutary one for many.
This period's poetry provides many cases of this sort, for good or ill; the post-Victorian milieu saw competing factions in the British literary scene attempt to chart a course for what a new and modern poetry might look like, and the intervening decades have not been kind to those who failed. The most promising faction in the pre-WWI context was probably the Georgians, collected under the editorial power of Edward Marsh's Georgian Poetry anthology series between 1911 and 1922. Coincidentally (seriously; I am no great fan of the Georgians), this is the same ten-year stretch of literature to which I would happily confine myself forever if I had to choose from all other writing that exists -- but that's another story.
The Georgians attempted to develop a new poetical voice that respected some of the formal conventions of Victorian work while probing more deeply into the complexities of emotion, thought, and affect. Whether they succeeded or not is another matter, but we may find among their number many perfectly respectable and even excellent poets whose reputations endure to this day. These anthologies included names you've almost certainly heard -- D.H. Lawrence, Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon (n.b. the fact that the latter three are now known far more prominently as war writers than as Georgians is not a coincidence). They also included names that mean little to the modern reader at all -- W.H. Davies, Gordon Bottomley, Thomas Moult, etc.
They also included J.C. Squire, who would eventually take over editorial duties on the series, as he would of so much else at that time. Squire had been the editor of the New Statesman during the latter half of WWI, and had also served as the literary editor for Land & Water from 1914 onward. After the war he took up editorial duties at the London Mercury, a very influential literary magazine, and it was during this time that his clashes with the avant-garde crowd began to intensify. He was the focal point of the "Squirearchy," a the term disparagingly applied to Squire and his colleagues by members of the Bloomsbury Group (e.g. Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, etc.), who were as close to formal enemies as either group had.
Squire, through his periodicals, his literary essays, his own poetry and his conversation, made very clear the contempt in which he held the new, experimental arts. He thought futurism was the stupidest thing going; he thought Pound, Lewis et al.'s Blast! one of the most ludicrous things ever published, and lamented its collapse only insofar as it meant that more such magazines might spring up to take its place; he hated what he viewed as the chaotic, japing formlessness of so much of Modernism, and he bridled at the seeming focus on the lurid, the depraved, the downcast and the disgusting in their works. Many of his associates with similarly conservative styles felt this way, too; you can find all sorts of essays by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc (for example) denouncing the excesses and barbarities of the Modernists. While Chesterton is experiencing something of a revival lately, the rest of those involved in this -- much like Squire himself -- have seen their stars more or less go out.
Anyway, the assumption of the triumph of Modernism has generated a popular conviction that James Joyce's Ulysses and Virginia Woolf's Orlando and so on were the leading books of their age, but they absolutely were not. While they are undoubtedly brilliant and very much worth reading now, their consumption at the time was dwarfed by that of far more conventional novels by the likes of Booth Tarkington, Eden Philpotts, F.R. Benson, G.A. Henty, Hall Caine, Mazo de la Roche, John Buchan and so on. It's a real shame, too! Buchan's Richard Hannay thrillers hold up very well even after a century, and F.R. Benson's Lucia novels are essential reading for anyone who enjoys Evelyn Waugh or P.G. Wodehouse.
De la Roche is especially interesting to me; her Jalna series spanned sixteen volumes and was for a time collectively the best-selling literary production in the English-speaking world. In spite of having run to almost two hundred editions in English alone, if you can even find a copy of one of those books now in a brick and mortar store, you're a luckier man than I am -- and if you can hear about them in an English class between the hours spent on "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, it will be something of a miracle. It's a sad story. I visited de la Roche's grave to apologize, once, for all the good it did.
TL;DR: The years have not been kind.