![]() ![]() His life and search were difficult, as Victorian England didn’t make life easy for homosexuals. His personal life was a long search for friendship of two types: intellectuals with a passion for literature (Tennyson, Thackeray, Carlyle), and unintellectual men much younger than himself who were noted for their “manly” looks. The first edition has several things in its favour: succinctness, and the fire and integrity of the original effort.Įdward FitzGerald was a strange character. “A flask of wine, a book of verse, and thou”… “The Moving Finger writes and having writ // Moves on”… and so on.įitzGerald came out with five editions of the Rubaiyat (the fifth being posthumous), with 75 four-line stanzas in the first edition, then tinkering with it for the rest of his life: adding another 30 stanzas, subtracting again, and constantly modifying words, phrases and punctuation. ![]() It has contributed more phrases and common quotations to the language, relative to its size, than any other piece of literature – including the Bible and Shakespeare. ![]() FitzGerald’s version of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat is one of the glories of English poetry. ![]()
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