Omar Khayyam. Beveridge, H. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, (1905) (July), pp. 521–526.
As is well known, the authors of the earlier Persian “anthologies do not give specimens of Omar Khayyam’s poetry. In fact, they did not regard him as a poet, but as a hakim, or philosopher, who occasionally wrote verses, and perhaps this view is more correct than the ordinary European one, and the estimate which Omar himself would have made. Poetry with him was the amusement of his leisure hours, and we might style his quatrains, in the words used by Palgrave about Bacon’s stanzas, as “a fine example of a peculiar class of poetry—that written by thoughtful men who practised this Art but little.”