In October 1962, the Library of Congress, with the support of the Bollingen Foundation and Poetry magazine, convened a three-day event called “The National Poetry Festival,” which aimed to be the largest-ever gathering of poets in the history of the United States. As fate would have it, the Festival happened to coincide with the Cuban Missile Crisis. My talk, drawn from the conclusion to my forthcoming monograph, Institutionalized Lyric: American Poetry at Midcentury, will briefly summarize my book’s argument and then examine the confluence of these events, poetry festival and international crisis, in order to pose a series of questions about that argument’s stakes: How did the Festival demonstrate the consequences of poetry’s institutional position, of its sense of its own audience and power, especially as its institutional commemoration was abruptly forced to accommodate an international crisis that was being managed within neighboring halls of state? How did the Festival’s theme, “Fifty Years of American Poetry,” imagine a relationship between the modernism of the century’s first half and the poetry of midcentury? Just two years earlier, Robert Lowell, while accepting the National Book Award for Life Studies, had described the legacy of modernism as a crisis for midcentury poetry. What shape did that crisis take as the representative poets of the century’s first and second halves shared a stage, and how did the pressure applied by the sudden emergence of an existential, global threat reveal the stakes of midcentury poetry’s investment in the institutionalized lyric? Finally, if, as I will argue, the gathering at the National Poetry Festival ultimately failed to imagine a kind of poetry that could take measure of the prospect of nuclear war, what would be immediate legacy of the period’s characteristic poetics?