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Khayyam, Omar xi. Impact on literature and society in the West

Khayyam, Omar xi. Impact on literature and society in the West. Jos Biegstraaten.
Encyclopaedia Iranica Online, December 2008.

The first scholar outside Persia to study Omar Khayyam was the English orientalist, Thomas Hyde (1636-1703). In his Historia religionis veterum Persarum eorumque magorum (1700), he not only devoted some space to the life and works of Khayyam, but also translated one quatrain (robāʿi) into Latin. The first quatrain in English was published in 1816 by Henry George Keene (1781-1864) in the famous magazine Fundgruben des Orients/Mines d’Orient. Although the founder of the Fundgruben, Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (1774-1856), translated a few of Khayyam’s poems into German in 1818, and Sir Gore Ouseley (1770-1844) into English in 1846, Khayyam was to remain relatively unknown for some time

Young Eliot’s Rebellion

Young Eliot’s Rebellion. V.M. d’Ambrosio.
In: Edward FitzGerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Ed. by H. Bloom. Philadelphia, Chelsea House, 2004. p. 119-149.
(From Eliot Possessed: T. S. Eliot and FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat. 1989)

The reception to the Rubaiyat in America is presented in “Young Eliot’s Rebellion” (pp. 119-149), where Vinni Marie D’Ambrosio introduces us to the influence it had on T.S. Eliot who discovered it in 1902. The ambiance of the time was pervaded by the rage for or against the Rubaiyat, which was considered to have played a role in the breakdown of America’s Protestant religion and of the Temperance ethic that the religion had subsumed. This cultural milieu of Eliot as a youth explains several of his poems and, as the author concludes, the youthful Eliot may have felt he was “not an imitator of Omar, but a manly, if secret, disciple of him”. (Abstract from: Abstracta Iranica)

Eliot possessed: T.S. Eliot and FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát

Eliot possessed: T.S. Eliot and FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát. Vinnie-Marie D’Ambrosio. New York: New York University Press, 1989. X, 244 p. ISBN: 0814718140.

Summary:
By his own account, T. S. Eliot’s love for poetry began when he first encountered the Rubáiyát at the age of fourteen, although he also claimed that he soon outgrew FitzGerald’s poem. D’Ambrosio’s monograph examines the complex ways in which both the poem and the figure of FitzGerald himself continued to haunt Eliot throughout his poetic career. (Victorian poetry, 2008)

Contents

Part I “Animula” (1929).
The possession
A bird’s-eye view
Eliot’s allegory
Omar and the boy
FitzGerald’s allegory
The “Low dream”
Part II. America.
Critical shifts: Norton, Aldrich, and more
Young Eliot’s rebellion
Part III. Crossings.
Parodying Omar at Harvard
Minuet a trois: Fitzgerald, Pound, and Eliot
Part IV. England.
The mystery in “Gerontion”
“Gerontion” and FitzGerald’s character
The dispossession.
Abbreviations
Notes
Index