Paradise enow. John Hollander.
In: Edward FitzGerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Ed. by H. Bloom. Philadelphia, Chelsea House, 2004. p. 185-194.
(From Yale Review 86, nr. 3 July 1998)
Hollander looks at paraphrases and satires inspired by the Rubaiyat and at editions and illustrations of the work.
Forgetting FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát. Erik Gray.
In: Edward FitzGerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Ed. by H. Bloom. Philadelphia, Chelsea House, 2004. p. 209-226.
(From SEL 41 (2001), nr. 4 (Autumn), p. 765-793.)
Gray argues that critics seem to have taken Fitzgerald at his word, who constantly advises in the Rubaiyat to ‘forget’. After a brief discussion of Tennyson’s poetry (also very concerned with the question of memory), Gray moves to examine the formal means Fitzgerald uses to efface his poem from the reader’s memory. Considering the poem’s publication history, the author suggests that “readers have never forgotten the Rubaiyat paradoxically because they are unable to remember it precisely”. “The poem is forgetful, or at least absent-minded, at every level: the rendition of the Persian, the rhymes, the quatrains, the different editions – all simultaneously recollect and efface dead selves.”
Bernard Quaritch and ‘My Omar’ – The struggle for FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát. Arthur Freeman.
In: Edward FitzGerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Ed. by H. Bloom. Philadelphia, Chelsea House, 2004. p. 169-183.
(From The Book Collector, special issue. 1997)
As a publisher, Bernard Quaritch’s principal claim to memory lies in his association with Edward FitzGerald. Quaritch’s imprint appears on the first four editions of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. His instrumentality in popularising The Rubaiyat was well recognised in its time. The publication history of The Rubaiyat is narrated.
Edward Fitzgerald and Other Men’s Flowers: Allusion in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Christopher Decker.
Literary Imagination 6 (2004) 2, pp. 213-239.
One of the most arresting images called to mind in Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám is that of the corpus redivivum, the buried corpse that turns to flowers gently in the grave. The body’s separate members suffer a metamorphosis into other objects that recompose and recollect their bygone looks. Khayyám reflects: I sometimes think that never blows so red The Rose as where some buried Cæsar bled; That every Hyacinth the Garden wears Dropt in its Lap from some once lovely Head. (XVIII)
Genre and Occasion in the Rubā‘iyyāt of ‘Umar Khayyām: The Rubā‘ī, Literary History, and Courtly Literature. Olga Merck Davidson
In: Writers and Rulers: Perspectives on Their Relationship from Abbasid to Safavid Times. Ed. by B. Gruendler, L. Marlow. Reichert, 2004. p. 133-147.
William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and ‘The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám’. Michaela Braesel.
Apollo (2004), (February)
Braesel discusses the manuscript designs by the British artists William Morris (1834-96) and Edward Burne-Jones (1893-98) for The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám which was translated in 1859 by Edward Fitzgerald. The author notes that two copies of the manuscript can be differentiated by Burne-Jones’s involvement in the designs, details Morris’s biographer Mackail’s account of the colour scheme adopted for the patterns in the manuscript, and compares the second version of the `Ynglings’ manuscript with patterns on the London manuscript for The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. She notes Morris’s interest in designs featuring female musicians, traces the history of the small manuscript format, and examines Morris and Burne-Jones’s reasons for avoiding illustrating the dramatic segments of the text.
Omar with a smile. Parodies in books on FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Jos Biegstraaten.
Persica 20 (2004), p. 1-37
In the spring of 1859 Edward FitzGerald had 250 copies printed of his Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Forty copies were for his own use, the remaining 210 were for sale in the bookshop of Bernard Quaritch, a London bookseller. No one was interested until 1861, when Whitley Stokes, a Celtic scholar, passed Quaritch’s bookstall and bought the book. He must have appreciated the contents, because he came back later and bought some additional copies. One of them he gave to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who introduced the quatrains to other members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, like Swinburne. The latter passed his admiration on to William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. It was the beginning of a period in which the Rubáiyát was to grow to an immense popularity in England.