The Ruba'iyat of Omar Khayyam (Penguin Classics)

Writing in the eleventh century, Khayyam was one of the most accomplished masters of the new and increasingly popular ruba'i, or two-line stanza, that had been adopted by poets to help them shake off the artifice of conventional court poetry and express their personal feelings with wit and clarity. Khayyam ranges in his stanzas through the most fundamental aspects of human experience and, since Edward Fitzgerald's Victorian translation, his verses have been among the most popular in the English language.