FitzGerald effectively created a new poetic form in his translations from Omar Khayyám. In Persian poetry a rubá'i (pl. rubáiyát) is a four line epigrammatic poem which stands as an independent quatrain. FitzGerald's Rubáiyát, on the other hand, presents a single, extended poem made up of various thoughts and images mostly taken from Khayyám's individual quatrains. It is the form FitzGerald created which concerns us here.

FitzGerald's poem was, in the words of Ezra Pound, effectively ‘stillborn’ until its discovery by the Pre-Raphaelites, whose enthusiasm was instrumental in popularising it. The establishment of the Omar Khayyám Club in 1892 gave further impetus and led to what has come to be known as the Cult of the Rubáiyát towards the end of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth. It has been a phenomenon rarely seen in any other literary culture. Since the publication of Swinburne's ‘Laus Veneris’ in 1866, there have been thousands of poems whose existence would have been impossible without the example of FitzGerald's Rubáiyát. For convenience of discussion (and, of course, only a small proportion of this material can be examined), these poetic materials are considered under three headings: parodies, imitations and dedicatory poems. The first two of these categories cannot, in this context, be absolutely distinguished; the differences between them are ones of emphasis rather than kind.