Old Fitz & T. S. Eliot

But there came a moment at about the age of fourteen, which he clearly remembered, when he picked up a copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, as translated by Edward Fitzgerald. The entry into the bright world of the poetic line was, he said, 'overwhelming'; he compared the experience to that of conversion, since the world itself seemed renewed and painted with 'bright, delicious and painful colours'. 'Painful', perhaps, because within the declamatory music of Edward Fitzgerald he glimpsed an image of the world, and of himself, larger than any he had known before.


--Peter Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot: A Life (1984), 26.