The Year of the Poet XI February 2024 - The Year of the Poet: Poets Create Bridges of Cultural Understanding Poetry

Foreword
Renowned Poets

Omar Khayyam

Omar Khayyam (1048 - 1123) was a Persian poet, famous for his Rubaiyat form of poetry built upon quatrains. He was also a well-known philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, mystic and a free-thinker, who wondered about the impermanence of life, and man's relationship to God. He lived in a time period when fanaticism, orthodoxy and military demagogues controlled and dictated people's daily life. Through his poems, Khayyam encouraged people to break free from the socio-political and religious tyranny. Unfortunately, his poems could not be circulated openly due to a callous an intolerant environment. As a result, only few of his contemporaries had the chance to read and benefit from it.

He doubted the existence of divine providence and the afterlife and chose to put his faith in a joyful appreciation of the fleeting and sensuous beauties of the material world to celebrate the idyllic nature and pleasures of living in a moment as below:

Set not thy heart on any good or gain,
life means but pleasure,
or means but pain;
when Time lets slip a little perfect hour,
O take it - for it will not come again.

Khayyam warned that if self-care is neglected and postponed to some obscure notion of 'tomorrow', the pleasure of living in the 'now' is irreversibly lost. He believed that each moment of life is complete in itself, by itself, and that the incompleteness manifests itself only in the 'mental state' of which we are not often aware. The natural world lives independently for itself, unattached to our feelings of pain and joy, and in Khayyam's view, acknowledging this liberating fact is the first step towards having a pleasant life. He said not to take things too seriously and to question existence of God and heaven:

Grab life with both your hands,
squeeze every bit it has to offer,
cherish it every day.
For what else is there?

Some scholars and critics argue that the name of Omar Khayyam should "be struck out from the history of Persian literature" due to the lack of any material that could confidently be attributed to him. While it is certain that Khayyam wrote many quatrains, it is hardly possible, save in a few exceptional cases, to assert positively that he wrote any of those ascribed to him.

The modern-day popularity of Khayyam is mainly due to the English translations of Edward FitzGerald (1859) from the Bodleian manuscript.

Ashok K. Bhargava
President, Writers International Network Canada
Vancouver, BC