SOURCE: Gray, Erik. “Forgetting FitzGerald's Rubáiyát.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 41, no. 4 (autumn 2001): 765-83.

In the following essay, Gray studies the ephemeral qualities of the Rubáiyát, suggesting that in both its structure and content, it is an exhortation to forgetting, and is well remembered partly because, paradoxically, its various editions obscure it.

Edward FitzGerald's Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám constantly advises the reader to forget—preferably with the help of a drink: “Ah, my Belovéd, fill the Cup that clears / To-day of past Regret and future Fears.” And again—“Oh, many a Cup of this forbidden Wine / Must drown the memory of that insolence!”¹ Readers have not forgotten the Rubáiyát: by the end of the nineteenth century, it “must have been a serious contender for the title of the most popular long poem in English,” and since then it...