William McKendree Carleton was an American poet. Carleton's poems were most often about his rural life. "What Robert Burns did for the Scottish cotter and the Reverend William Barnes has done for the English farmer, Will Carleton has done for the American-touched with the glamour of poetry the simple and monotonous events of daily life, and shown that all circumstances of life, however trivial they may appear, possess those alternations of the comic and pathetic, the good and bad, the joyful and sorrowful, which go to make up the days and nights, the summers and winters, of this perplexing world" - Summary by Wikipedia