I don't think it was anything like this.

The English language was in crisis. The best writers of the day Stevenson (writing about pirates and highwaymen) Wilde, Lionel Johnson and later Brooke(writing poetry in a style that sounded a hundred years old or more) - it simply wasn't talking about contemporary life. Much in the same way that modern folksong writers can't tear themselves away from the subject of the first world war, and the past.

Moreover when poets like Davidson (who famously wrote a poem about a a clerk making Thirty Bob a Week) tried to write embrace modern subjects - the results weren't inspiring.

The modernists tried to write about their own world, whilst insisting that they had a place in the pantheon of English Lit. Thus all the references and cross references, classical and literary and multicultural. And I beg to differ - it does make for a bloody hard read quite often.

It worked for a time, but it was odd and nothing odd lasts long without being challenged. Kingsley Amis famously described Ezra Pound's Cantos as the ravings of a maniac rampaging through a museum - and surely we can apply the same criticism to portions of Joyce and Eliot.

Their lasting innovation has been the insistence of incorporating ones own experience into the literary creation and using ones own language. Lets hope it permeates one day to the writers of folksongs - well we can hope!