The Rose Garden Of Omar Khayyam

The Rose Garden of Omar Khayyam is an English collection of poetry attributed to the Persian polymath Omar Khayyam (c. 1048-1131). Khayyam is famous in the English-speaking world primarily through Edward FitzGerald’s 1859 translation of selected quatrains as the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which became one of the most successful English language poetry collections of the nineteenth century.

Khayyam himself was a major figure of medieval Persian intellectual life. He worked as a mathematician on substantial problems in algebra and geometry, served as an astronomer for the Seljuk court, and produced the calendar reforms that gave Persia one of the most accurate calendars of the medieval world. The poetry that has made him famous in the West was a relatively small part of his actual life work.

The Rose Garden gathering brings additional Khayyam quatrains and related Persian material into English for readers who want more than the standard FitzGerald selection.