Spring and All No Longer in Peril

This article revisits a talk at a William Carlos Williams panel that would come to have a major impact on discussions of poetry and poetics, but which also made clear the problematic critical divide between the Williams of the short lyric and the Williams of genre-defying, experimental work, such as Spring and All. The panel took place at the 1983 MLA Convention in New York City, and the speaker was Charles Bernstein. This introductory article to this special issue discusses the original event as well as the talk itself—“The Academy in Peril: William Carlos Williams Meets the MLA”—which has since been published in essay form. In addition, this introduction considers the lasting importance of Spring and All, which was also the topic of a 2023 MLA Williams panel in which Bernstein participated with Bob Perelman and Juliana Spahr to provide their perspectives on the 100th anniversary of Spring and All and the fortieth anniversary of “The Academy in Peril.”