![]() ![]() Through brilliant imagery they celebrate the sensuous pleasures of life - wine, food, love - while also mourning the painful truth of its brevity. The epigrammatic stanzas, infused with a melancholy yet consoling philosophy that urges readers to seize the day and 'make the most of what we yet may spend', have proved to be enduringly intriguing and popular. A manuscript of some of his rubáiyát (four-line verses) survives in the Bodleian Library and a copy of this manuscript is thought to have inspired Fitzgerald to begin the translation.įitzgerald's mystical and sensual version of Omar Khayyám's quatrains is freely translated and restructured to follow the course of a day. ![]() He was also an astronomer and a mathematician. Omar Khayyám (1048-1131) was a Persian poet and philosopher who lived at the court of Malik Shah. In turn, it has influenced writers such as Matthew Arnold and Thomas Hardy, not to mention many musicians and film-makers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Since then, it has become one of the most popular poems. But a chance find in a bookshop by a friend of the Pre-Raphaelites led to it being taken up by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, and from then on its popularity grew. When Edward Fitzgerald first published his translation of the poetry of Omar Khayyám in 1859 it had little impact on the literary world. A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread - and Thou …' ![]()
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