FitzGerald, Edward

Edward FitzGerald, (born March 31, 1809, Bredfield, near Woodbridge, Suffolk, Eng.—died June 14, 1883, Merton, Norfolk), English writer, best known for his Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, which, though it is a very free adaptation and selection from the Persian poet’s verses, stands on its own as a classic of English literature. It is one of the most frequently quoted of lyric poems, and many of its phrases, such as “A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou” and “The moving finger writes,” passed into common currency.

FitzGerald was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he formed a lifelong friendship with William Makepeace Thackeray. Soon after graduating in 1830, he retired to the life of a country gentleman in Woodbridge. Though he lived chiefly in seclusion, he had many intimate friends, including Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Thomas Carlyle, with whom he kept up a steady correspondence.

A slow and diffident writer, FitzGerald published a few works anonymously, then freely translated Six Dramas of Calderón (1853) before learning Persian with the help of his Orientalist friend Edward Cowell. In 1857 FitzGerald “mashed together,” as he put it, material from two different manuscript transcripts (one from the Bodleian Library, the other from Kolkata [Calcutta]) to create a poem whose “Epicurean Pathos” consoled him in the aftermath of his brief and disastrous marriage.

In 1859 the Rubáiyát was published in an unpretentious, anonymous little pamphlet. The poem attracted no attention until, in 1860, it was discovered by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and soon after by Algernon Swinburne. FitzGerald did not formally acknowledge his responsibility for the poem until 1876. Its appearance in the same year as Darwin’s Origin of Species, when the sea of faith was at its ebb, lent a timely significance to its philosophy, which combines expressions of outright hedonism (“Ah take the Cash, and let the Credit go”) with uneasy ponderings on the mystery of life and death. See also Omar Khayyam.