No, not Charles Darwin, not this time. By beautiful coincidence both anniversaries are shared by a modest chap called Edward Fitzgerald, born a few weeks after Darwin in the same affluent social class but far away in Suffolk. While Darwin was at Down House in Kent preparing to publish his world-changing On the Origin of Species, and the Poet Laureate, Alfred Tennyson, put the finishing touches to Idylls of the King, Fitzgerald shyly produced 250 copies of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/commen ... 955623.eceIt didn't sell at first: remainders were offered at a penny each. Then a young scholar called Stokes found one, showed it to the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (who thought it as beautiful as the book of Ecclesiastes), hence to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and eventually John Ruskin, who “never did till this day read anything so glorious”.
On a wave of curly pre-Raphaelite orientalism it spun to fame, reaching America by 1869. One of the finest and rarest editions lies on the sea bed, in the Titanic; in the eastern United States there was an early sect of addicts, and it was heard quoted in the “most lonely and desolate spots of the high Rockies”. Thomas Hardy founded an Omar club and had a stanza read to him on his deathbed: 150 artists have illustrated it and more than 100 composers set it to music, notably in a 1909 oratorio by Sir Granville Bantock for two symphony orchestras and double choir.
But its reputation faded. America remembers it more publicly, with an important exhibition running now in Austin, Texas; but in Britain Fitzgerald is an almost forgotten poet, not fêted in Westminster Abbey but modestly overgrown in an obscure Suffolk grave.
He will not stay forgotten now, thanks to the energetic gathering of support by Professor Tony Briggs, of the University of Bristol, better known for his Russian scholarship. Professor Briggs is banging the drum for The Rubayiat and the lesser poems, and has edited a lovely new edition...
Book details here:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Omar-Khayyam-Ev ... 075382678X
