Published for the first time 150 years ago, Edward FitzGerald's translation of the quatrains attributed to the Persian astronomer and mathematician Omar Khayyám acquired a cult in the English-speaking world, and then crossed linguistic barriers to become an international cultural phenomenon in its own right. According to the Iranian author Sadeq Hedayat, who published the first modern study and selection of the quatrains in Persian, FitzGerald's Rubáiyát was a factor in rekindling interest in Khayyám's poetic legacy even in his native land, where the old sage had always been honoured as the greatest of mathematicians and astronomers, but never included in the rostrum of great Persian poets.

The quest for the cause of the Rubáiyát's celebrity is of long standing, but it has neither found a definitive answer, nor lost its relevance. The articles in Harold Bloom's collection Edward FitzGerald's The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám published in 2004 are as much a part of this quest as the challenge which Ezra Pound posed 70 years earlier in 1934 to would-be students of the art of reading poetry effectively: ‘Try to find out why the FitzGerald Khayyám has gone into so many editions after having lain unnoticed until Rossetti found a pile of remaindered copies on a second-hand bookstall.’ And immediately after, teasingly: ‘Did the “90s” [i.e. the 1890s] add anything to English literature or did they merely prune Swinburne? and borrow a little from the French symbolistes?’ [sic]