To the extent of ultimate boredom

Sometime in the past year I read an account by Churchill of his early days as a reporter of the Boer War. In it he recounted how he sailed from Britain to South Africa with the general appointed to lead the campaign. What was striking was that the journey took some weeks and that for much of the time, this being pre-radio, they were completely isolated from any information regarding how the campaign might be developing in their absence. Once or twice they spoke some other steamer and obtained abbreviated news, flashed by signal lamp in passing. Reading this account in an age of constant contact, it reinforced some of those critical differences that we can overlook when considering the past.

I recently came across a book, Minorities: Good Poems by Small Poets and Small Poems by Good Poets, collected by T.E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia. It is interesting to see the nature of poems to which he was attracted. A footnote caught my eye though and reminded me of Churchill's experience.

The poem from which he is quoting is a chorus by A.C. Swinburne in Atalanta in Calydon, a text of several hundred lines which reads in part:

Who hath given man speech? or who hath set therein
A thorn for peril and a snare for sin?
For in the word his life is and his breath,
And in the word his death . . . .

In the footnote:

On the voyage to Syria from England in 1913 'I came to know the early work of Swinburne better than before. He is quite good after all, though alas, like Browning long-winded to the extent of ultimate boredom. On the steamer however, where all passengers yawn their way along the decks between meals, he was very well.'

While enjoying various bodies of poetry, I generally share Lawrence's judgment regarding 'long-winded to the extent of ultimate boredom.' Even the extended odes of a poet that I really enjoy such as Longfellow for example, quickly lose me. Undoubtedly that is a personal fault but I wonder to what extent there are forms of writing (poetry or otherwise) which lent themselves to a time, age, and technology, when audiences could be anticipated to be held captive and effectively, for want of other entertainment, had little alternative to trudging through the extended works.

This wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Famously, Churchill was never a particularly bright academic star. In another autobiographical work of Churchill's, My Early Life, he identifies his real education as occurring during his time stationed in India early in his career, when heat and the traditions of the officer ranks meant that he had long periods of enforced idleness to read and began to read widely and voluminously.