Poetry, scholars claim, is one of the oldest living art forms. The Death of the Hat: A Brief History of Poetry in 50 Objects traces the canon from the Middle Ages - when poets may have written about a sword, a candle, or a bookworm - to the current day, when their subjects might be cocoa or a birthday card. Yet a fascination with the natural world has held true for poets across the millennia, as evidenced by Cui Tu's Tang Dynasty poem "A Solitary Wildgoose" and Mary Oliver's contemporary poem "The Summer Day".