In the middle of Walt Whitmans When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomd, his elegiac masterpiece on the death of Abraham Lincoln, the speaker listens intently to the song of a bird and asks, O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved? (10.1). He wonders not only how to mourn but more importantly how to translate grief into verse. This study examines the poetry that results from such contemplation by Whitman, W. H. Auden, and Paul Muldoon, three poets whose American careers led to a flood of elegiac verse. It examines Whitmans assertion of the power, place, and potential of poets in America beside the poetry of Auden and Muldoon, an Englishman and Irishman who moved to the U. S. and eventually were naturalized as American citizens. All three published elegies, but the poems were not only occasioned temporally. Indeed, elegy, a poetic form historically occasioned by a happening the death of someone or something in America becomes conditioned by the very space in which its writers find themselves. While both Auden and Muldoon responded to contemporary deaths such as those of W. B. Yeats, Ernst Toller, Michael Heffernan, Mary Farl Powers, and Paddy Muldoon, they also turned their elegiac focus to long-dead figures from Henry James and Sigmund Freud to Brigid Muldoon and a host of artists who had lived in Brooklyn.Whitman, Auden, and Muldoon look backward in time to the dead or the abandoned to help shape their future in America, for their work finds its landscape, though vast and open, nonetheless haunted. Through their journeys to or in America, they hope for a renewal of their poetic and national identities, and they explore such yearning particularly poignantly through elegy, demonstrating an American predisposition to the form especially because of the poems they craft during times of national and poetic identity crises.