This week in our poetry news round up, we take a look at the Byron Museum in Ravenna and China’s “daughter of poetry” who has died at the age of 100.
Lord Byron Museum to Open in Ravenna
A museum that will be dedicated to the life and works of Lord Byron the flamboyant British satirist and poet will be opening in Ravenna in Northern Italy. Visitors to the museum, which will be located in the Palazzo Guiccioli, will be able to explore the building where the poet completed some of his most famous work and also had an affair with the wife of a local aristocrat. Byron moved to the property in 1819.
The sprawling residence, which is located in the heart of the city, has recently been restored, and from this weekend will be open to visitors. They will be able to explore the rooms where Byron conducted his affair and where he completed a number of his masterpieces including Sardanapalus, The Prophecy of Dante, written about the poet Dante Alighieri, and Don Juan.
In one of the rooms there are a number of love tokens that the countess kept, including letters, locks of Byron’s curly hair and shards of sunburned skin.
Part of the museum will also be dedicated to Risorgimento, the movement of unification that dates from the 19th century and with which Byron had connections. The museum hopes to show the three sides of the man that Byron was; the poet, the lover and the man with freedom as an ideal.
Whilst Byron was living in Ravenna, he was visited by his friends Thomas Moore the Irish poet and writer and Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of the most important English Romantic poets.
China’s “Daughter of Poetry” Dies Aged 100
The revered figure of classical Chinese poetry, Yeh Chia-ying, has died in the northern port city of Tianjin at the age of 100.
Widely referred to as the “daughter of poetry,” she had spent seven decades researching and then promoting classical Chinese poetry in Taiwan, mainland China and also the US and Canada. She was a strong influence on many students, including the literary masters Xi Murong and Kenneth Pai Hsien-yung.
Born in 1924, her family were renowned in literary circles and her early years steeped in the traditions of Chinese poetry, set against a backdrop of 20th century Chinese history. She studied under the poetry master Gu Sui in 1941 and married in 1948 when she relocated to Taiwan. Her husbands incarceration during the turbulent unrest there pushed her into teaching and publishing her own poetry in order to raise her daughter.
She moved to Canada in the 1960s to teach at the University of British Columbia, a role she kept for many years. In 1976, tragedy consumed her when her children in law were killed in a car crash and she made the decision to move back to China.
She retained an active role in literary circles even in her later years, both in the field of education and also in poetry competitions, where she was always happy to give her critique.
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