The Rubaiyat Of Omar Khayyam

''A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread ¿ and Thou ¿''When Edward Fitzgerald first published his translation of the poetry of Omar Khayy¿in 1859 it had little impact on the literary world. But a chance find in a bookshop by a friend of the Pre-Raphaelites led to it being taken up by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, and from then on its popularity grew. Since then, it has become one of the most popular poems. In turn, it has influenced writers such as Matthew Arnold and Thomas Hardy, not to mention many musicians and film-makers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Omar Khayy¿(1048¿1131) was a Persian poet and philosopher who lived at the court of Malik Shah. He was also an astronomer and a mathematician. A manuscript of some of his rub¿¿(four-line verses) survives in the Bodleian Library and a copy of this manuscript is thought to have inspired Fitzgerald to begin the translation.Fitzgerald¿s mystical and sensual version of Omar Khayy¿s quatr