The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is the title that Edward FitzGerald gave to his translation of a selection of poems, originally written in Persian and of which there are about a thousand, attributed to Omar Khayyam (1048Ð1131), a Persian poet mathematician and astronomer of great Scientific Accomplishments. A rubaiyat is a two-line stanza with two parts per line, or quatrains. Fitzgerald was a talented poet; however, this is not a serious and scholarly translation of Khayyam's work, and represents many of his own ideas and line of thought. The original verses from which Fitzgerald drew his inspiration, are a collection of isolated and separate "quatrains", which resemble the Japanese haiku in function, if not in form. The quatrain, is a very popular in Persian poetry. This is the only form of poetry attributed to Khayyam, whose fame in his own time was through his influential works as a mathematician and astronomer. Indeed, he was only twenty-four when he wrote his most important work, a pioneering treatise on algebra. Fitzgeralds Rubaiyat describes what he believed to be the thoughts and feelings of Omar Khayyam, with seemingly Eastern tones and colors, but in a way that would be appealing to a Western audience. The Rubaiyats tendency to rebel against the restricting Puritanism of the Victorian era, captured the imagination of many freethinkers of the time, yet it was only universally appreciated, after Fitzgerald's death.
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