After years of teaching and writing about elegy I’ve concluded that this is work in which the intellectual and the personal are deeply intertwined. Many of the colleagues with whom I collaborated on Modernism and Mourning (2007) were motivated in their work, as was I, by their own experiences with grief. Many of my students have told me about the solace they have found in the elegiac poems and memoirs we’ve studied. When preparing to present a literary studies perspective at an interdisciplinary conference on “Death and Dying” in 2018, I sought to widen my understanding of mourning by studying the manuals consulted by bereavement therapists. Those clinical accounts of grief taught me not to overestimate the utility of poetic elegies. At the same time, they seemed impoverished, lac