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William Carlos WilliamsA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
“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
as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky
and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth
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.
By William Carlos Williams
Approach of Winter
Approach of Winter
William Carlos Williams
Between Walls
Between Walls
William Carlos Williams
In the American Grain
In the American Grain
William Carlos Williams
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
William Carlos Williams
Paterson
Paterson
William Carlos Williams
Spring and All
Spring and All
William Carlos Williams
Spring Storm
Spring Storm
William Carlos Williams
The Red Wheelbarrow
The Red Wheelbarrow
William Carlos Williams
The Young Housewife
The Young Housewife
William Carlos Williams
This Is Just to Say
This Is Just to Say
William Carlos Williams
To Waken An Old Lady
To Waken An Old Lady
William Carlos Williams