Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, the Astronomer-Poet of Persia Rendered Into English Verse by Edward FitzGerald, Together with a Life of Edward FitzGerald and an Essay on Persian Poetry

Edward FitzGerald's famous translation of the Rubáiyát is a complex beast. Great poetry it is indeed, simple quatrains where East seems to meet West in a conjoining of Eastern mysticism and poetry and nineteenth century Western language and expression. The Rubáiyát is a compilation of roughly five hundred epigrams, or short, often witty sayings, presented in quatrains, or ruba'i, written throughout Khayyám's life. This Book contains 1st Edition And the 5th Edition of the Translation. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám is the title that Edward FitzGerald gave to his 1859 translation from Persian to English of a selection of quatrains (rubāʿiyāt) attributed to Omar Khayyam (1048-1131), dubbed "the Astronomer-Poet of Persia". Although commercially unsuccessful at first, FitzGerald's work was popularised from 1861 onward by Whitley Stokes, and the work came to be greatly admired by the Pre-Raphaelites in England. FitzGerald had a third edition printed in 1872, which increased interest in the work in the United States. By the 1880s, the book was extremely popular throughout the English-speaking world, to the extent that numerous "Omar Khayyam clubs" were formed and there was a "fin de siècle cult of the Rubaiyat".