The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

By Omar Khayyam (Ghiyāth al-Dīn ʿUmar ibn Ibrāhīm Nīshābūrī)

The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám is an 1859 translation from Persian to English by Edward FitzGerald of a selection of quatrains (rubāʿiyāt) attributed to Omar Khayyam (1048–1131), dubbed "the Astronomer-Poet of Persia". Although commercially unsuccessful at first, FitzGerald's work was popularised from 1861 onward by Whitley Stokes, and the work came to be greatly admired by the Pre-Raphaelites in England. FitzGerald had a third edition printed in 1872, which increased interest in the work in the United States. By the 1880s, the book was extremely popular throughout the English-speaking world, to the extent that numerous "Omar Khayyam clubs" were formed and there was a "fin de siècle cult of the Rubaiyat". FitzGerald's work has been published in several hundred editions and has inspired similar translation efforts in English, Hindi and many other languages.