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Edward Fitzgerald and Other Men’s Flowers: Allusion in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

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)

William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and ‘The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám’

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

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.

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)

Edward FitzGerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

Edward FitzGerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. Broomall, Chelsea House, 2004. (Bloom’s modern critical interpretations)
vii, 252 p. ISBN: 0791075834

Summary:
This edition brings together the most important 20th-century criticism on Edward FitzGerald’s The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam through a number of previously published articles and chapters by well-known literary critics. The collection also features a short biography on Edward FitzGerald, a chronology of the author’s life, and an introductory essay written by Harold Bloom.

Contents

Editor’s note

Introduction
Harold Bloom

The fin de siècle cult of FitzGerald’s “Rubaiyat” of Omar Khayyam
John D. Yohannan

The Rubaʻiyat of Omar Khayyam
Iran B. Hassani Jewett

Fugitive articulation : an introduction to the Rubaʻiyat of Omar Khayyam
Daniel Schenker

The discovery of the Rubaʻiyat
Robert Bernard Martin

The apocalyptic vision of La vida es sueño : Calderʹon and Edward FitzGerald
Frederick A. de Armas

Young Eliot’s rebellion
Vinnie-Marie d’Ambrosio

Larger hopes and the new hedonism : Tennyson and FitzGerald
Norman Page

Bernard Quaritch and “My Omar” : the struggle for FitzGerald’s Rubaʻiyat
Arthur Freeman

Paradise enow
John Hollander

The tale of the inimitable Rubaiyat
Tracia Leacock-Seghatolislami

Forgetting FitzGerald’s Rubaʻiyat
Erik Gray

Chronology

Contributors

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index