“The Deformed Transformed”: How Lord Byron’s disability inspired his poetry

Lord Byron was known as equal parts famous and infamous. He has always been famous for both causing scandals and writing beautiful poetry. He has been described by many as his time’s equivalent of a bad boy celebrity. His poetry and his scandalous lifestyle were in no small part influenced by his disability which weighed heavily on his mind. Expressing his feeling surrounding it inspired some of his greatest works of poetry, and trying to compensate for it, some of his greatest scandals.

There has been much discussion surrounding Byron and his deformity. It was well known that he walked with a limp and that he was ‘lame’ in one of his feet. However the fact that he was extremely secretive about it meant that even his closest friends didn’t know the details. Accounts by his contemporaries conflicted both on the nature of the deformity and on which side it affected. Most of the credible evidence however suggests that it was his right foot and that the condition was congenital. Modern scholars and doctors suspect that Byron had a clubbed foot, causing it to curl inwards and make his right leg shorter than his left, causing his halting gait and asymmetric cadence. He had specially made inner boots that padded out his calf and put a wedge under his foot that was thicker on one side and shaved thin on the other so that he could then wear normal shoes over the top of them.

Given that Byron went to great lengths to hide his legs and feet by hiding them under wide legged trousers that strapped under his shoes, it is not surprising that as well as causing him physical pain, his condition caused him great stress and anxiety. He described it as instilling in him a “corroding bitterness” and resentment towards his own body. Body dissatisfaction has been proven to be associated with a range of physical and psychological health problems, such as exercise dependence, eating disorders, and alcoholism. Byron exhibited signs of all of these. He threw himself into sports in an attempt to prove his physical prowess despite his disability, as shown by his swimming the Hellespont, the stretch of water between Europe and Asia. His womanising, alcohol consumption and extreme dieting are also seen as attempts to compensate for his physical disability.

Though it caused him great anguish, if Byron had not had his disability the world may not have had one of it’s most well known poets. His disability drove him to strive for greatness and fame, and he did this through his poetry. Byron poured a lot of himself into his poetry and used it as an outlet for his feelings surrounding his resentment towards his body. Byron wrote himself into his poetry with most of his heroes living under curses. The most famous and most obvious representation of himself in his work is the character Arnold in the posthumously published poem “The Deformed Transformed”. The main character is deformed and unloved due to his hunched back. In making a deal with the devil for a new beautiful body the character is representing Byron’s shame and unhappiness in his own disability. However the character perfectly represents Byron’s dual thinking on this aspect of himself as the poem states

“There is

A spur in it’s halt movements, to become

All that other’s cannot”

With this line Byron recognises that it is at the very least in part his disability that has spurred him onto achieve greatness. Despite the anguish it caused him had Byron not been born as he was, he likely never would have achieved the level of fame and success that he did.