To Elsie

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1945

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Related Poems

“This Is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams (1934)

This is arguably Williams’s most famous poem. It originally appeared alongside “To Elsie” in the collection Spring and All. The poem’s speaker leaves a pithy, comical note to a presumed loved one on a refrigerator, in which the speaker apologizes for eating the plums the loved one was most likely saving for breakfast. Despite the poem’s surface-level simplicity and humor, it’s been studied extensively by critics and endlessly parodied by poets and other artists. Like “To Elsie,” “This is Just to Say” addresses someone else and, with its ending, suggests there’s more to be said on the subject at hand. This short poem is also a departure from “To Elsie” in that it presents its subject matter through humor.

“America” by Allen Ginsberg (1956)

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) shot to fame with the 1956 publication of “Howl,” a revolutionary poem that challenged American politics and social mores, uprooted traditional poetics, and led to its publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s arrest and trial for obscenity charges. Ginsberg’s name is now synonymous with the Beat movement and counterculture, and his image remains part of pop culture despite later accusations against Ginsberg for selling out by becoming a part of the establishment (he began teaching via professorships and taking on speaking engagements). Ginsberg was influenced by Williams’s work, and his poetry offers his own interpretation of America’s challenges and class divides.

“Cantico del Sole” by Ezra Pound (1926)

Ezra Pound (1885-1972) was Williams’s contemporary, colleague, and friend. Pound is associated with High Modernism and Imagism, with many of his works polarizing readers due to his penchant for hermeneutics, foreign languages, and all-around erudition. Pound also had a complicated relationship with America and would eventually become an infamous expat who at one point supported Mussolini and fascism, and who later resided in Italy with his wife and mistress after his release from a psychiatric hospital. “Cantico del Sole” explores what America means to Pound in a manner reminiscent of “To Elsie”: The poem addresses America’s potential.

Further Literary Resources

“Intertextual and Inter-Ethnic Relations in William Carlos Williams's [sic] "To Elsie": A Poetics of Contact” by José María Rodríguez García (2002)

This article from Rodríguez García in Journal X offers an exploration of ethnic and social divides within “To Elsie.” Rodríguez García also investigates the “poetics of contact” in Williams’s body of work as a whole, suggesting a premise of deeper social understanding in Williams’s work: “[Williams’s] texts of the early 1920s are meant to allow the reader to ‘become awake to his own locality’ so that he or she begins to ‘perceive more and more of what is disclosed and find himself in a position to make the necessary translations” (2). Put simply, a poem like “To Elsie” allows readers to understand an ethnic and social class perhaps different from their own.

“Some Elsie, Some Man: Encounters with the Disabled in William Carlos Williams’ Poetry” by Emperatriz Ung (2015)

Ung’s paper, presented for the Sixth Biennial Conference of the William Carlos Williams Society, uses the concepts of “normate” and “non-normate” to address people with and without disabilities. Ung argues that transformations of understanding occur when these two subjects meet, and Williams’s poetry is an incubator in which these transformations clearly arise and therefore inform. Elsie, from “To Elsie,” is representative of the “non-normate” individual. Her presence in Williams’s household transforms his understanding of disability, ethnicity, and social status.

“William Carlos Williams Dies; Physician Long a Leading Poet; Won Many Literary Honors Over Half a Century-- Was 79 Years Old Combined Two Professions W. C. WILLIAMS DOCTOR-POET, DIES Won Literary Awards” by The New York Times (1963)

This is an original obituary for William Carlos Williams, featured in The New York Times shortly following Williams’s death.