The set of the sails ...

Omar Khayyam (ca.1048-1122) was a Persian mathematician, astronomer and philosopher who was not known as a poet in his lifetime. Later a constantly growing corpus of rubaiyat  (quatrains), largely skeptical and hedonistic in nature, became attached to his name, though only some of them were genuinely his work.

                In 1859, Edward FitzGerald (1809-1883), a well-educated English country gentleman who also did translations from Spanish and ancient Greek, published a free adaptation of a selection of this Persian poetry, creating what was essentially a new work of English poetry. Click below to read a few sample stanzas.