Description
Omar Khayyam (1048?-1131) was a Persian poet, astronomer, and mathematician of the early Seljuk period and is best known for
a collection of Rubáiyát, or quatrains, known as the
Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam. The collection contains materials related to the work of Omar Khayyam and scholars who studied his works, much of it collected
by Ambrose George Potter in the course of his biographical compilations.
Background
Omar Khayyam (1048?-1131) was a Persian poet, astronomer, and mathematician of the early Seljuk period, best known for a collection
of Rubáiyát, or quatrains, known as the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam; in 1859 the English translator Edward FitzGerald selected and combined 101 of the quatrains into a single work, producing
a continuity that created an English language masterpiece; FitzGerald's work was publicized by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and
the emphasis on the sensuous enrichment of life helped to influence the Decadent school of English poetry in the 1890s; since
FitzGerald, the Rubáiyát has been translated into numerous languages. Ambrose George Potter was the outstanding bibliographer
of Omar, and author of A Bibliography of Printed Editions of the Quatrains of Omar Khayyam in Foreign Languages (1923) and A Bibliography of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, Together With Kindred Matter in Prose and Verse Pertaining Thereto (1929); he also completed work on a revised and enlarged edition of his 1929 bibliography, but his materials were destroyed
by fire in 1938 before publication, and he did not publish another edition before his death in the late 1940s.