
Both the characters of Philomela from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Lavinia from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus are raped and have their tongues cut out. Both characters also communicate despite this tragedy and Philomela specifically transforms into a nightingale—a traditional symbol for poetry, music, and poetic expression. Disability Studies scholar Lennard Davis notes that this symbol is important as it shows there is a cultural/ conceptual connection between artistic expression and “dumbness”.

Claremont Graduate University

Disability has been a longstanding tradition in literature and poetic verse. There is a strong tradition of employing disabled (and especially mute) female characters who communicate their message, truth, or trauma via unusual means and often these female characters represent creativity, truth, justice, or the spirit of poetic expression. Examples include the character of Philomela from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Lavinia from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. 

Disability in Poetry

Hall, A. (2016). Literature and disability (Ser. Literature and contemporary thought). Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Literature and Disability

Dumbness, Female Characters, and the Literary Tradition


Despite the fact that poems are comprised of words, poetry frequently features themes that value experience outside of speech or words, such as the focus on senses (touch, smell, etc.) found in the poetry of Raymond Luczack and the work of disabled writer Petra Kuppers. Kuppers and other scholars argue that the flexibility of poetry as well as the focus on the experience of the individual makes poetry a perfect vehicle for communicating about the disabled experience and the aforementioned perceptions/ communication beyond words.

The Disabled Experience in Poetry

Disabled poets frequently employ staccato language and words or imagery often dismissed by those who use purely person-first language or terms like “differently abled”. The poetry of Cheryl Marie Wade is one example of this as she employs words such as “gimp” and “crip”. This is fairly common in post ADA poetry and some poets refer to all purposefully unusual and brusque poetry by disabled poets as “crip poetry”.

Crip Poetry

Some disabled scholars and poets, such as writer Jim Ferris, cite the work of Emily Dickinson as an early source of disabled poetry that specifically focuses on the body and the experience of living in an othered or ill body. Dickinson specifically communicates some elements of this experience with broken lines and staccato language—practices that are still used frequently in disabled poetry of today.

History of Disability in American Poetry

Disabled poetry frequently uses free verse or obviously augmented versions of metered or form poetry (sonnet, limerick, etc.) as a way of defying the normal conventions of a poems “body”. In this way, disabled poets are not only disobeying rules set forth for the body of a poem, they are also, in turn, making a comment about bodily conventions/ questioning what defines a body.

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