Chapter 4 - A Victorian Poem: Edward FitzGerald's Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

Summary

2009 was the year of centenaries: Calvin and Gladstone, Johnson and Swinburne – the list was a long one. In Cambridge, this was peculiarly striking. While the University was celebrating its 800th anniversary, several of its alumni were fêted as well. The year 1809 had produced three distinguished Cantabridgians: Charles Darwin, Alfred Tennyson and Edward FitzGerald. There was something wonderfully serendipitous in the realisation that so private and reticent a man as FitzGerald was sharing the limelight with two of Victorian England's most monumental presences. Tennyson and FitzGerald both studied at Trinity College and soon afterwards became friends: not an easy friendship, as it happened, but an important one for both of them. FitzGerald's ‘translation’ – if that is what it is – of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám was one of the most popular poems of the nineteenth century. Tennyson's praise of it did not quite rise to the occasion: according to F. T. Palgrave, he commended ‘FitzGerald's famous Omar Paraphrase, in which Oriental thought is so marvellously refracted through the atmosphere of modern English style’: faint praise for a work of such stature, though the blandness may be Palgrave's more than Tennyson's. As I hope to show, however, the two poets had a good deal in common and the traffic seems to have flowed in both directions. It was FitzGerald who encouraged Tennyson to learn Persian, though Tennyson's interest in Middle Eastern poetry pre-dated FitzGerald's engagement with Omar Khayyám. But the actual relationship between the two men is not terribly enlightening.