SOURCE: D'Ambrosio, Vinnie-Marie. “The Possession” and “Parodying Omar at Harvard.” In Eliot Possessed, pp. 3-7, 89-128. New York: New York University Press, 1989.

In the following excerpts from two chapters in Eliot Possessed, D'Ambrosio maintains that FitzGerald's Rubáiyát profoundly influenced T. S. Eliot's works, particularly “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

[“the Possession”]

Because the reputation of the Rubáiyát has lain at its nadir for some fifty years, the poem's impact on Eliot, or on anyone, has not seemed to be a probable subject for serious consideration.¹ Its effect, however, was wider and deeper than any but the Persianists among us understand. Even near the end of its heyday, Eliot's friend and mentor, Ezra Pound, said that the Rubáiyát was “the only good poem of the time that has gone to the people”²—and indeed it had, with a vengeance.

During Eliot's...