Born on this day in Rutherford, New Jersey, poet William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) was a pediatrician before he became a successful writer. He was a life-long friend of Ezra Pound who shared his passion for verse.

"The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost," believed Williams who published his first volume of poetry in 1913.

"He exemplified the art of the eye," praised American poet laureate Robert Pinsky. "What makes his poems persist is the art of ear and mind, the extraordinary sentences and rhythmns he made."

Along with Pound and T.S. Eliot, William's poetry celebrated the Imagist movement and focused on the magic of American poetic. Like Robert Frost, Williams used idiom and language to capture the distinctive sounds of his native voice.

His eight-lined The Red Wheelbarrow (1959) invited us to pay attention to the ordinary, everyday things in life, emphasizing the concrete, not the abstract, showing the contrast between the colors white and red.

"No ideas but in things," he wrote in A Sort of a Song. "Invent."

Williams had a 40-year medical practice--he would write poetry in his car after visiting patients. The good doctor received the 1963 Pulitzer Prize for Pictures from Brueghel, a 10-year collection which included his joyous proclamation: "Only the imagination is real!"

Love's greatest power is forgiveness.