Overview

Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám Revisited: The Wine, the Vine, and the Rose examines an overlooked masterpiece which was a phenomenon in its day. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, translated by Edward FitzGerald (1809-1883), sold millions of copies between its first publication in 1859 and World War II, becoming one of the best-selling books of all time, only to disappear from the public eye until the age of the Internet revived interest in the work. Russell Brickey synthesizes scholarship and close reading in the first monograph dedicated to the Rubáiyát, taking into account the original poetry of Omar Khayyám (1038-1141), a polyglot who lived in medieval Persia, and the western poetic tradition that informed FitzGerald’s creative palimpsest. These include the Song of Solomon, 17th century Cavalier Poetry, the Sonnet Sequence, and the poems of Alfred Tennyson, William Wordsworth, and others. This book looks at the offshoots of Omar Khayyám and Edward FitzGerald’s poetic brotherhood, the pulp-novels, movies, and poems their poem inspired.

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9781666960013

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Reviews

Few Victorian poems appealed so widely and so long as did FitzOmar's transmogrified Rubaiyat. Now Russell Brickey's omnibus introduction bids fair to win the poem a new audience in our time. Readers can sample here a compendium of friendly approaches - by way of poetic form, insouciant philosophical slapstick, literary roots and proliferating offshoots. Harvesting the best recent scholarship, Brickey advances fresh speculations steeped in the critic's appreciative conversancy with a beloved text. Russell Brickey's book provides in one place the most comprehensive survey of the culture and cult of 'FitzOmar'. The breadth of its analysis of the great translation-poem's sources and analogues is unparalleled. Hearing FitzGerald's Rubáiyát resound with more than one echo of the anacreontic and erotic elements of Cavalier poetry as well as other sources of cascading allusion, Brickey is likely to stimulate new critical appraisal of FitzGerald's anti-metaphysical metaphysical poetry and the way that its popularity has kept pace with readers' recognition of its overt and covert inclusions of English and other European poetry. It is a welcome addition to FitzGerald and Rubáiyát studies, with something worth learning everywhere in its pages.

Author Information

Russell Brickey is independent scholar.

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