To Elsie

by Pericles Lewis

William Carlos Williams's poem “To Elsie" (1923) demonstrates his doctrine “no ideas but in things" and his effort to create a type of modernist poetry “in the American grain,” as he put it in the title of one of his essay collections. The poem commemorates what might be called forgotten Americans, in the person of a mentally challenged maid who worked for Williams:

The pure products of America
go crazy—
mountain folk from Kentucky
or the ribbed north end of
Jersey

After describing, with a mixture of sympathy and distaste, the mixed parentage and fecklessness of Elsie, the poem ends with a pessimistic use of that image of modernity so praised by the futurists—the automobile: “No one / to witness / and adjust, no one to drive the car.” Williams, a college friend of Ezra Pound’s at the University of Pennsylvania, moved back to his native Rutherford, New Jersey after completing medical school and worked as a pediatrician all his life. However, he remained connected to the New York artists and poets.^[1]

1. ↑This page has been adapted from Pericles Lewis's Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2007), p. 150.