Happy 129th Birthday to William Carlos Williams (American poet)

from Writer's Almanac (American Public Media: Garrison Keillor) broadcast

September 17 is the birthday of the American poet who wrote this highly-recognizable and oft-parodied poem:

I have eaten
  the plums
  that were in
  the icebox
and which
  you were probably
  saving
  for breakfast.
Forgive me
  they were delicious
  so sweet
  and so cold

That's William Carlos Williams, born in Rutherford, New Jersey (1883). He was a doctor as well as a poet, and his poems often spoke of simple things: the objects of everyday life, or moments in the life of ordinary people. He summed up his poetic philosophy with the phrase "no ideas but in things."
William Carlos Williams, who also wrote, "It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there."
And, "We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness. Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels."