This chapter discusses what happens to modernism, the revolutionary movement that dominated the first half of the twentieth century, as it becomes institutionalized, and examines the movement’s legacy after 1945. It discusses how the poetry of the post-1945 period became dominated by a major schism between “academic” and “anti-academic” poetry (or, as Robert Lowell called it, the “cooked” versus the “raw”). The chapter charts the advent of the New Criticism and explains its main principles, goals, and practitioners, focuses on examples of formalist poems in the New Critical mode by Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, and James Merrill, and introduces the new, alternative forms of poetry that came to be known as “The New American Poetry.”