![]() That all changed when a remaindered copy of FitzGerald’s 20-page booklet was picked up for a penny by the Celtic scholar Whitley Stokes, who passed it on to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who subsequently fell in love with it and sang its praises to his Pre-Raphaelite circle. Mill’s On Liberty – went completely unnoticed: it didn’t sell a single copy in its first two years. ![]() Its initial publication in 1859 – the same year as Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and J.S. Obscure beginnings perhaps, but the poem’s remarkable publishing history is the stuff of legend. ![]() ![]() How did a 400-line poem based on the writings of a Persian sage and advocating seize-the-day hedonism achieve widespread popularity in Victorian England? The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám was written by the eccentric English scholar Edward FitzGerald, drawing on his loose translation of quatrains by the 12th-century poet and mathematician Omar Khayyám. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |