The title of my essay comes from Robert Browning's ‘House’ (1876), which describes a building that has lost its façade and so stands entirely open to public view: ‘Right and wrong and common and queer, / Bare, as the palm of your hand, it lay’. And my argument is that Edward FitzGerald's Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (first published in 1859) is in several respects both common and queer, both very usual and quite unusual, and that these two qualities are equally ‘bare’ or evident. Yet the poem's familiarity – for nearly a century the Rubáiyát was the best known and most widely read poem in English – has tended to obscure its oddity. As Daniel Schenker wrote in 1981, ‘the universal acceptance gained by FitzGerald's poem as a kind of timely wisdom has rendered the poem overly familiar…and therefore an uninteresting subject of inquiry for most modern readers’. In the years since Schenker offered this assessment, the poem's popular readership has declined, while critical interest has (perhaps in exact proportion) revived. But even now the poem's familiarity continues to distort critical perception of it: we see what is common or straightforward about the Rubáiyát, but not what is queer.

Two unusual aspects of the Rubáiyát in particular are thus hidden in plain sight. First, its language: the enormous popularity of the Rubáiyát has long led critics (both admirers and detractors) to assume that the poem must be simple, its diction and style easily comprehensible.