FORM, COGNITION, AND CULTURAL TRANSMISSION: THE RECEPTION OF OMAR KHAYYAM’S QUATRAINS IN THE WEST

Abstract

This article follows the transmission of Omar Khayyam’s quatrains from medieval Persian manuscripts into a place within Western literary culture. It answers three interconnected questions: why Western audiences came to love the quatrains, how translation and recognition developed across Western languages, and what thematic core the quatrains repeatedly express. The analysis identifies four mutually reinforcing mechanisms. First, the quatrain’s concise four-line form aids cognitive encoding and retrieval by providing regular rhythmic cues and syntactic closure support chunking and verbatim recall, making individual quatrains easy to memorize and repeat. Second, the poems’ musicality and concentrated imagery engage affective and auditory processing, provoking memorable emotional responses across readers. Third, translators and editors acted as cultural agents who fashioned a coherent Khayyamic voice by prioritizing tonal unity and readable cadence; that persona resonated with Victorian audiences negotiating scientific advance and religious uncertainty. Fourth, publishing practices and cultural reuse amplified salience: illustrated editions, anthologies, ephemera, and quotation in popular media created feedback loops that normalized the quatrains as cultural capital. Close reading shows the poems repeatedly return to motifs of mortality, epistemic humility, sensual pleasure, and a carpe diem ethic, with religious language functioning often as metaphor or interrogation rather than doctrinal assertion. The piece concludes that the intersection of form, affective resonance, translational framing, and dissemination dynamics explains Khayyam’s Western success, and it recommends interdisciplinary methods to test and refine this account