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93 CHAPTER FOUR Forgetting FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát A year before his death, Edward FitzGerald speculated that the reason for the success of his Rubáiyát was that Omar “sang, in an acceptable way it seems, of what all men feel in their hearts, but had not exprest in verse before” (LF 4:487). It would be difficult to find a more succinct explanation for the poem’s enormous popularity, and equally difficult to put a name to the quality that FitzGerald describes: what is this word that all men know? He might be referring to the poem’s hedonism or its resigned fatalism, but such sentiments were not entirely unfamiliar to readers of poetry. More likely he had in mind the poem’s overt agnosticism, which he considered to be its most important feature; but religious skepticism was not something that “all men [felt] in their hearts,” which is exactly why the Rubáiyát seemed so exotic. The sentiment FitzGerald defines, at once universal and unstated (at least in verse), seems closest to what the previous chapters have described as indifference. The Rubáiyát represents a culmination of the paradoxical tendency observed in the poems already discussed to deny their own claim to the reader’s attention. The poem expends most of its energy trying to avoid notice and to accomplish nothing. Even its hedonism—the repeated calls to drink, for instance—invokes self-indulgence less as a pleasurable end in itself than as a means to indifference or oblivion. Its skepticism is likewise a form of evasion: the poem expresses doubts about the Creator, not in order to exalt humankind but rather to reduce it and so evade accountability . God is alternately invoked and denied, depending on which option seems to leave one with fewer responsibilities: anything to make life, not better, but easier. Like Keats, though to a far greater degree, FitzGerald adopts an epistolary model for his poem, which seizes upon any opportunity to limit itself and to submit to the inevitable. Like Byron’s, FitzGerald ’s was an expatriate imagination, which loved to run away from the 94 Chapter Four world it knew yet denied any real familiarity with the foreign worlds and languages it habitually chose instead. Indifference in the Rubáiyát takes the form of forgetting. The poem does not so much harden itself to the past as efface it altogether, seeking a state “Where name of Slave and Sultán is forgot” (quatrain XI).1 Unlike Keats and Byron, however, FitzGerald is as negligent of the future as the past: “Ah, my Belovéd, fill the Cup that clears / To-day of past Regret and future Fears” (XXI). The Rubáiyát steadfastly refuses to consider anything but the present; or if it does speculate on something not immediately tangible to the senses, it indulges in nostalgia for a hazily conceived bygone time, but almost never expresses a hope for the future. Thus what appears in Tennyson’s In Memoriam as a remarkable but temporary strain of indifference to ambition becomes for FitzGerald a dominant motif. Christopher Decker, the poem’s latest editor, notes that the Rubáiyát “can be read as one of the best poems ever written about the condition of not being a great poet, and not wanting to be” (Rub., p. xx); in his review of Decker’s edition, Norman Kelvin suggests that the “modern reader . . . will be put off” by this quality: We are at the high point of an historical process that declares winner take all, lack of ambition is betrayal of society, if not self-betrayal, and failure is unsupported by any social rules that might sustain self-respect in the face of such calamity. (Kelvin 121) Kelvin’s point is a good one, but it does not apply equally to all readers. The Rubáiyát maintains its appeal today, even as it did in the midnineteenth century, specifically because it fails to follow the ideologies of an age dedicated to progress and self-improvement. But if the poem’s indifference to ambition has not deterred “modern readers,” it has certainly discouraged modern critics, who for a long time have had almost nothing to say about the Rubáiyát despite its prominence. By the end of the nineteenth century the Rubáiyát “must have been a serious contender for the title of the most popular long poem in English,” and since then...

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