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By William Carlos Williams

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


William Carlos Williams, “To Elsie” from The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I, 1909-1939, edited by Christopher MacGowan. Copyright 1938, 1944, 1945 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Source: The Collected Poems: Volume I 1909-1939 (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1945)

  • Social Commentaries

Poet Bio

William Carlos Williams
Born in Rutherford, William Carlos Williams spent almost his entire life in his native New Jersey. He was a medical doctor, poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright. With Ezra Pound and H.D., Williams was a leading poet of the Imagist movement and often wrote of American subjects and themes. Though his career was initially overshadowed by other poets, he became an inspiration to the Beat generation in the 1950s and 60s. See More By This Poet

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