The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
22 May, 2014
890 Other literatures
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. In 1859 the poet Edward FitzGerald published a long poem based on the verses of the 11th-century Persian scholar Omar Khayyam. Not a single copy was sold in the first few months after the work’s publication, but after it came to the notice of members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood it became enormously influential. Although only loosely based on the original, the Rubaiyat made Khayyam the best-known Eastern poet in the English-speaking world. FitzGerald’s version is itself one of the most admired works of Victorian literature, praised and imitated by many later writers.
Guests
- Charles Melville
2 episodes
Professor of Persian History at the University of Cambridge - Daniel Karlin
3 episodes
Winterstoke Professor of English Literature at the University of Bristol -
Kirstie Blair No other episodes
Professor of English Studies at the University of Stirling
Reading list
-
Victorian Afterlives: The Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-Century Literature
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (Oxford University Press, 2002) Google Books → -
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Edward FitzGerald (Daniel Karlin ed.) (Oxford University Press, 2009) Google Books → -
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Edward FitzGerald (Dick Davis ed.) (Penguin Classics, 1989) Google Books → -
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: A Critical Edition
Edward FitzGerald (Christopher Decker ed.) ( 1997) Google Books → -
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Edward FitzGerald (Tony Briggs ed.) (Phoenix, 2009) Google Books → -
A Book of Verse: The Biography of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Garry Garrard (History Press, 2007) Google Books → -
The Poetry of Indifference: From the Romantics to the Rubaiyat
Erik Gray (University of Massachusetts Press, 2005) Google Books → -
With Friends Possessed: A Life of Edward FitzGerald
Robert Bernard Martin (Faber & Faber, 1985) Google Books → -
Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: A Famous Poem and its Influence
William H. Martin and Sandra Mason (Anthem, 2011) Google Books → -
The Art of Omar Khayyam: Illustrating FitzGerald's Rubaiyat
William H. Martin and Sandra Mason (I.B. Tauris, 2007) Google Books → -
Allegories of One's Own Mind: Melancholy in Victorian Poetry
David G. Riede (Ohio State University Press, 2005) Google Books → -
The Great 'Umar Khayyam: A Global Reception of the Rubaiyat
A. A. Seyed-Gohrab (ed.) (Leiden University Press, 2012) -
The Life of Edward FitzGerald: Translator of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Alfred McKinley Terhune (Greenwood-Heinemann Publishing, 1980) Google Books → -
The Letters of Edward FitzGerald
Alfred McKinley Terhune and Annabelle Burdick Terhune (eds.) (Princeton University Press, 1980)
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Programme ID: b043xpkd
Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b043xpkd
Auto-category: 891.5511 (Persian poetry)