Can elisp express regexps literally?

You could build the expressions as sexps with the rx macro instead.

That example would read (rx "text" (group "pattern"))

To illustrate how rx behaves, these additional examples come from rx.el's commentary:

The expression ^;;\\s-*\n\\|^\n turns into

  (rx (or (and line-start ";;" (0+ space) ?\n)
  (and line-start ?\n)))

The expression [ \t\n]*:\\([^:]+\\|$\\) turns into

  (rx (and (zero-or-more (in " \t\n")) ":"
  (submatch (or line-end (one-or-more (not (any ?:)))))))

There aren't any regexp literals, though pcre2el (https://github.com/joddie/pcre2el) is an alternative that plenty of people find useful.

In particular, you can call it from elisp this way:

(rxt-pcre-to-elisp
 "(uvw|xyz)\\w+\\d+")
   ;; => "\\(\\(?:uvw\\|xyz\\)\\)[_[:alnum:]]+[[:digit:]]+"