Edward Fitzgerald Biography Quotes 15 Report mistakes

Early Life
Edward FitzGerald was born on 31 March 1809 at Bredfield House near Woodbridge in Suffolk, into a family that would, during his boyhood, adopt the surname FitzGerald after his father, John Purcell, assumed the name and arms of his wife's family. The rural landscape of Suffolk shaped his sensibility: quiet, observant, and drawn to the cadence of ordinary life, he cultivated a taste for solitude and conversation rather than for public display. Comfortable means allowed him to read widely and to develop the reflective habits that later colored both his original writings and the supple adaptations that made his name.

Education and Cambridge Circles
FitzGerald studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he formed friendships that endured for decades. Among them were Alfred Tennyson, already a rising figure in poetry, and James Spedding, the meticulous editor and critic; their talk and letters gave FitzGerald a lifelong model of exacting taste united with emotional warmth. William Makepeace Thackeray, another friend from the wider Cambridge and London milieu, reinforced FitzGerald's sense that literature could be both urbane and humane. Although he took an undistinguished degree and never sought an academic career, the Cambridge habit of close reading and debate remained central to his methods.

Quiet Years and Early Writings
After Cambridge, FitzGerald returned to Suffolk rather than the London literary world. He published sparingly at first, but with a distinctive voice. Euphranor (1851), a dialogue on youth, and Polonius (1852), a commonplace book of aphorism and observation, showed his elegance of thought, his ear for talk, and his preference for the intimate over the grand. He read deeply in Spanish literature and issued Six Dramas of Calderon (1853), not as literal scholarship but as living English plays. Friends recognized that he worked best when he could re-sound an earlier music in his own idiom.

Friendship with Bernard Barton and Marriage
In Suffolk he befriended Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet of Woodbridge, whose kindly temper and modest verse suited FitzGerald's own gentle reserve. After Barton's death, FitzGerald maintained close ties with the family and in 1856 married Barton's daughter, Lucy. The marriage soon proved unhappy; they separated without public rancor, and he continued to provide for her. The episode confirmed his inclination to a bachelor's life among books, letters, and a small circle of trusted friends.

Persian Studies and Edward Byles Cowell
A turning point came in the early 1850s when FitzGerald met Edward Byles Cowell, a brilliant linguist who introduced him to Persian. Cowell's guidance, and later his letters from India, led FitzGerald into a new world of poetry, particularly the quatrains attributed to Omar Khayyam. Cowell had examined manuscripts in Oxford and abroad and urged FitzGerald to try his hand at an English version. Out of this collegial exchange grew a work that would eclipse all of FitzGerald's other writings.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
In 1859 FitzGerald published The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, anonymously, through the London bookseller Bernard Quaritch. Initial sales were poor; the pamphlet drifted into Quaritch's penny box. Then a circle of alert readers, among them Dante Gabriel Rossetti, recognized its strange, lucid beauty. Word spread among poets and painters; in time Algernon Charles Swinburne and others lent it fervent advocacy. FitzGerald steadily revised the work across later editions, enlarging and reshaping the sequence. He called his method a kind of transfusion rather than strict translation: an attempt to render the spirit and movement of the Persian into English verse that breathed naturally. Themes of wine, fate, the turning of the seasons, and the vanity of human schemes were cast in memorable quatrains whose cadence became unmistakable in Victorian England.

Other Translations and Adaptations
Even as the Rubaiyat became his signature achievement, FitzGerald persisted in the art that had prepared him for it: refashioning earlier works into clear, flexible English. He continued to work with Spanish drama and produced versions from the Persian, including a rendering of Jami's Salaman and Absal. He was less concerned with philological exactitude than with the creation of a living poem in English; this preference sparked occasional debate but also won grateful readers who felt that he had given them literature rather than a crib.

Life in Suffolk and Habits of Mind
FitzGerald made his home in and around Woodbridge for most of his life, notably at Little Grange. He loved the river Deben, boating with local sailors and fishermen, and treasured the talk of neighbors as much as correspondence with far-off friends. He read and re-read favorite authors, especially the 18th-century English poets and George Crabbe, whose plain-spoken Suffolk scenes he admired, and filled letters with shrewd, affectionate criticism. Tennyson remained a touchstone; FitzGerald's private comments on the Laureate's books were candid yet loyal, the counsel of a friend who prized both exactness and feeling. His letters to Cowell, to Spedding, and to other intimates reveal a temperament at once ironic and tender, skeptical of systems, and grateful for small, sustaining pleasures.

Reputation, Correspondence, and Literary Circle
As the Rubaiyat's reputation grew, FitzGerald himself stood slightly aside from fame. He published without flourish and preferred to let the poem travel on its own. Yet the circle that sustained him was distinguished: Tennyson and Thackeray in poetry and prose; Cowell in scholarship; Rossetti in the arts; Quaritch in the world of books; James Spedding and, later, William Aldis Wright, who helped preserve FitzGerald's legacy. Readers who came to the Rubaiyat through salons and clubs found, in the end, a Suffolk gentleman who wrote letters as finely tuned as his verse and who sought fidelity to tone rather than to word-by-word equivalence.

Later Years and Death
In later years FitzGerald remained in Suffolk, tending friendships, revising his versions of Omar, and maintaining the quiet routines that had long sustained him. He died on 14 June 1883 and was buried in Boulge churchyard near Woodbridge, close to the fields and lanes that had formed his earliest sense of the world. After his death, William Aldis Wright edited selections of his letters and writings, bringing to public view the delicacy of mind that his closest friends had always known.

Legacy
FitzGerald's enduring place in English letters rests on a paradox: the most personal of poets became famous for a translation. He turned Omar Khayyam into a Victorian classic by treating translation as an art of re-creation, matching cadence to cadence and mood to mood. The friendships that shaped him, above all with Alfred Tennyson and Edward Byles Cowell, gave him standards and materials; the patient support of Bernard Quaritch and the early advocacy of Dante Gabriel Rossetti helped his work find readers. In an age crowded with systems and reforms, FitzGerald's voice remained skeptical, companionable, and humane, attentive to the passing hour and the consolations of style. His letters and versions together show a writer who trusted conversation, valued craft over notoriety, and found in the company of a few kindred spirits the measure of a literary life.

Our collection contains 15 quotes who is written by Edward, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Truth - Live in the Moment - Free Will & Fate - Legacy & Remembrance.

Other people realated to Edward: F. Scott Fitzgerald (Author), Robert Emmet (Activist), William Hamilton Maxwell (Novelist)

• 1859 Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Poem)
• 1853 Six Dramas of Calderon (Translation)
• 1852 Polonius: A Collection of Wise Saws and Modern Instances (Collection)
• 1851 Euphranor: A Dialogue on Youth (Book)
• 1837 Dialogues and Plays (Book)

• Wikipedia