Fugitive articulation: an introduction to The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. D Schenker.
In: Edward FitzGerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Ed. by H. Bloom. Philadelphia, Chelsea House, 2004. p. 59-76.
(From Victorian Poetry 19, no. 1.)

Schenker takes an innovative and challenging look at the Rubaiyat, questioning why we fail today to respond to it as a work of serious literary art (p. 60). The author compares its effect on an audience with that of an “unimpeachable contemporary masterpiece, T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. The Rubaiyat’s wide appeal might be that it “institutionalizes a cult of spiritual resignation” and that it is “sufficiently void of meaning to be recyclable in any number of contexts”. In his analysis of the poem, the author recognises its “verbal claustrophobia”.