Edward FitzGerald's Rubáiyát attracted many parodies. One of the first to receive wide publication was Rudyard Kipling's ‘Rupaiyat of Omar Kal'vin’, which appeared in his collection Departmental Ditties (1886) and uses FitzGerald's form to complain about a salary cut imposed upon colonial administrators. These British beginnings notwithstanding, parodists of the Rubáiyát were especially numerous and voluble in the USA. Given the prominence of the Rubáiyát as a text in late-nineteenthand early-twentieth-century America – a bibliography in the New York Times in June 1899 lists 31 Rubáiyát editions centred on FitzGerald's translation and 14 editions by other translators – the existence of parodies would perhaps seem unsurprising. With its distinctive stanza form and its memorable aphorisms, the poem was a highly visible target. Yet even allowing for the poem's popularity and wide availability, and for the idiosyncrasies that might seem to invite parody, the number of American parodies, and their persistence across time, seem disproportionate and intriguing. An anthology of parodies, for example, edited by Carolyn Wells (1904), who herself parodied the Rubáiyát, begins with a section of poems ‘after Omar Khayyam’ that includes ‘The Golfer's Rubaiyat’, ‘An Omar for Ladies’, ‘The Modern Rubaiyat’ and ‘The Baby's Omar’, by various authors. The large collection of parodies spanning about thirty years (with the most being created in the decade after 1900) demonstrates, moreover, an interesting range in tone and approach.