The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

More about the book

When Edward Fitzgerald first published his translation of the poetry of Omar Khayyam in 1859 it had little impact on the literary world. 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. Since then, it has become one of the most popular poems. 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.