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One may not necessarily agree with Adam Phillips's provocative statement in Promises, Promises (2001) that literature is “probably a better preparation for the practice of psychoanalysis than the reading of anything else” (p. xvi), or that “there has always been only one category, literature, of which psychoanalysis became a part” (p. 364), to recognize the fruitful cross-fertilization of literature and psychoanalysis. Poets and psychoanalysts have long illuminated each other's field, particularly with respect to mourning, which Freud called the “work of grief.” Until a few decades ago, the most influential theory of bereavement remained Freud's magisterial 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” in which he argued that the griever must withdraw libidinal attachment from the lost love object lest mourning become pathological. For the mourner to survive, in other words, the dead must remain safely dead. But a new paradigm of mourning appeared in 1996 with the publication of Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief by Klass, Silverman, and Nickman. Based on their clinical and empirical research, the coauthors conclude that “survivors hold the deceased in loving memory for long periods, often forever, and that maintaining an inner representation of the deceased is normal rather than abnormal” (p. 349). Nowhere is the theory of continuing bonds better seen than in elegiac poetry, as Judith Harris demonstrates in her important new book, The Poetry of Loss: Romantic and Contemporary Elegies.