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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
I quoted to [my Boy Reader] the first line of Gray's Elegy, which he had never heard of. This shows how things have altered since my young days…then we only heard too much of Gray's Curfew.
Edward FitzGerald[The revised Rubaiyat] was still a short poem, but he wanted to keep it so, partly in emulation of Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard, whose brevity he had always admired.
Robert Bernard Martin[The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám's] only rival as the most popular and widely-read book of poetry of the last century and a half is Housman's A Shropshire Lad, (a work with which it has much in common)… 1859 was also the year of the birth of the most obvious poetic beneficiary of FitzGerald's poem: A. E. Housman…
Dick DavisAnniversary Year
The anniversaries of literary figures are enjoyable and useful occasions. They bring renewed emphasis on a writer's work, inviting celebration, serious discussion, fresh insights and new publications. They also provide an opportunity to assess or reconfirm a writer's reputation and value. In 2009 there was a three-fold anniversary opportunity for one of our poets, Edward FitzGerald, who, until quite recently, was so popular that almost everyone could quote from his work with a mixture of admiration, amusement and affection. The year 2009 marked the bicentenary of his birth on 31 March 1809, the sesquicentenary of his most important work, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859) and the centenary of Sir Granville Bantock's vast and splendid oratorio, Omar Khayyam (completed in 1909).
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