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![]() ![]() ![]() He in turn passed it to his friend Algernon Charles Swinburne and it soon became a staple of Victorian reading matter, culturally ubiquitous and overwhelmingly popular. After an initially disastrous reception (it seems that, initially, not one of the 250 copies Fitzgerald had printed were sold, and ended up in a penny box outside bookseller and sometime-publisher Bernard Quaritch in Leicester Square) a copy was eventually passed by an acquaintance to Romantic artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Translated (or, as Fitzgerald put it, ‘transmogrified’) from the quatrains of 11 th century Persian poet, philosopher and mathematician Omar Khayyam by Edward Fitzgerald and first published in 1859 in pamphlet form, it has rarely been out of print since and has appeared in over 650 different editions. Perhaps one of the best-known, best-loved and most-illustrated poems in the English language, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is a unique publishing phenomenon. Edmund Dulac, ‘Night’, illustration for the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. ![]()
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