“To Elsie” is a free verse poem written in 1923 by American Imagist poet William Carlos Williams. It originally appeared in his full-length poetry collection Spring and All under the title “Poem Number XVIII.” Later, when it was republished in Williams’s Collected Poems (1934), it was given the title “To Elsie.” The poem is a response to the consumer trends and modernization of 1920s America and a call to action to reconnect with our own humanity.

Poet Biography

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) was an American poet and medical practitioner best known for his Imagist free verse poetry. He grew up in a multicultural household and learned Spanish from his expatriate parents. Williams was born and lived most of his life in Rutherford, New Jersey, with a detour of several years’ study in Geneva, Paris, New York, Pennsylvania, and Leipzig. During these years he studied and trained extensively in medical practice, and, returning to Rutherford after his marriage, went on to become a family doctor there for many years. Williams spent his life balancing a dual career in both poetry and medicine, finding fulfilling success in both.

While studying in Pennsylvania, Williams became close friends with the Modernist poet Ezra Pound, who would have a profound influence on the former’s work. Williams was notoriously critical of the work of T. S. Eliot, in particular his poem “The Waste Land,” which he believed to be a step backwards in the trajectory of poetic evolution. Moving away from more traditional poetic structures, Williams sought to create an aesthetic style that was distinctly American. His popularity reached its peak in the 1950s and ’60s as it was embraced by the Beat generation of poets.

Williams slid into a health decline after a heart attack in 1948, succumbing to a cerebral hemorrhage in 1963. In that same year he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his collection Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems. Today, the Poetry Society of America offers a “William Carlos Williams Award” each year for the best book of poetry published by a small publishing house.

Poem Text

The pure products of America

go crazy—

mountain folk from Kentucky

or the ribbed north end of

Jersey

with its isolate lakes and

valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves

old names

and promiscuity between

devil-may-care men who have taken

to railroading

out of sheer lust of adventure—

and young slatterns, bathed

in filth

from Monday to Saturday

to be tricked out that night

with gauds

from imaginations which have no

peasant traditions to give them

character

but flutter and flaunt

sheer rags—succumbing without

emotion

save numbed terror

under some hedge of choke-cherry

or viburnum—

which they cannot express—

Unless it be that marriage

perhaps

with a dash of Indian blood

will throw up a girl so desolate

so hemmed round

with disease or murder

that she'll be rescued by an

agent—

reared by the state and

sent out at fifteen to work in

some hard-pressed

house in the suburbs—

some doctor's family, some Elsie—

voluptuous water

expressing with broken

brain the truth about us—

her great

ungainly hips and flopping breasts

addressed to cheap

jewelry

and rich young men with fine eyes

as if the earth under our feet

were

an excrement of some sky

and we degraded prisoners

destined

to hunger until we eat filth

while the imagination strains

after deer

going by fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September

Somehow

it seems to destroy us

It is only in isolate flecks that

something

is given off

No one

to witness

and adjust, no one to drive the car

Williams, William Carlos. “To Elsie.” 1923. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

The speaker reflects on the nature of true Americans, particularly those they know from around Kentucky or Jersey; in addition to the natural beauty in those areas, there are criminals, people with disabilities, and disreputable men who have come to work on the railroad. These men often have sexual relations with the young women of the area, whom the speaker defines as “immoral” and “loose” for six days out of the week.

At night, the women dress in gaudy modern clothes that are trendy but without any real style. There is no romance in these liaisons, only detached fear as they are taken advantage of outside. Sometimes these experiences might result in a child. The child will grow up surrounded by crime and poor living conditions, so that they’ll be taken away into an orphanage or foster home before being sent to work—maybe for a stately doctor’s home outside the city.

The child, who has grown into a young woman, is damaged in the head and speaks the truth of those around her without filter. The woman clumsily tries to attract the attention of wealthy men, as though she and everyone around her were trapped in a place of dirt and refuse.

The speaker considers how they still long for the freedom and beauty of the natural world, but this longing only makes their circumstances seem more painful and oppressive. They catch glimmers of what another life could be, but only in passing and with no way to hold onto them.