Philip Levine talks about being taught by Robert Lowell and John Berryman at the University of Iowa, where his classmates included Donald Justice, W.D. Snodgrass and Henri Coulette.

Poet Robert Dana describes his experience in the Iowa Iowa Writers’ Workshop, including his class with Robert Lowell, and eating at the Iowa Memorial Union:

In addition to Lowell’s workshop class, there was the more or less impromptu one we ourselves convened around the lunch table once or twice a week in the dingy and steaming cafeteria in the basement of the old Student Union: a kind of expanding and contracting court of complaint, a floating seminar in practical criticism, a rump parliament in literary theory, where we fed on each other’s praise and harkened to each other’s criticisms. Poems were handed around, sometimes scribbled on, lamented over. The talk was free-wheeling, unfettered, sometimes even preposterous. No telling how many bad lines and bad poems perished in those sessions. Probably not enough. But our little seminar brought us together in knowledge and ignorance and friendship.

Jan Weissmiller, poet and co-owner of Prairie Lights Bookstore, describes a few of the haunts and hangouts in Iowa City where Robert Lowell and John Berryman would meet in the 1950s:

On the way from Prairie Lights to Iowa Book, are two bars and two restaurants that surely contain either writers or ghosts of writers. The first is Micky’s Irish Pub (11 South Dubuque Street). The antique bar at Micky’s was moved from the original Donnelly’s bar on Dubuque Street, now at 110 East College Street, where Workshop writers Robert Lowell and John Berryman met …

Robert Sullivan remembers receiving a phone call from Robert Lowell when he was staying at the Jefferson Hotel in downtown Iowa City:

[There was a call] from the Jefferson Hotel, not more than a mile or two from our apartment. The caller was Robert Lowell. I had not seen him or been in touch with him since Easter weekend, 1943, when he and Jean Stafford were living with Allen and Caroline T?te. I was surprised that Cal [Lowell’s nickname] remembered me, more surprised that he knew I was in Iowa, and even more surprised that he had found somebody, most likely Paul Engle, the director of the Writers’ Workshop, who knew how we could be reached. Cal even knew that I was married, and he invited Jane and me to come to his room. He was lonely. Would we come?

In a letter to Allen Tate on March 15, 1950, Lowell describes his life in Iowa City:

All has turned out very well. We are living in a large light room and kitchen, furnished with borrowings, pick-ups, and two packing trunks–our own, and large as garages. The Macauleys are a block down the street, and the Wests a few blocks to the south in a frail brick Wormwood house with urns on the lawn….Every afternoon a pack of very harmless and sorry-looking stray dogs settles on our pathway. This is one of the marks of Iowa City; the others are high-brow movies, the new criticism, a quarter of an inch of ice, and the Benasek murder trial, which Elizabeth is moving heaven and earth to enter as an accredited reporter.

In January of 1950 the Lowell’s moved into their first Iowa City apartment at 728 Bowery Street. He found his students unremarkable but among them only a few intelligent and talented individuals. His workshop class was held in a temporary structure in the barracks that remained on the east side of the Iowa River after World War II. At the end of his first semester at Iowa, he and his wife traveled to Italy for a year as Lowell had proven he was welcome at Iowa at any time. Upon their return to Iowa a year later, the Lowell’s fell back into the swing of their Iowa City lives, quickly finishing their final year and a half there. Lowell stayed busy with his classes and traveled frequently to other universities to speak or teach.  For the most part Lowell found the city, the university and the people “tame and friendly” and his teaching experiences were rife with personal growth and epiphanies about his own writing.

A number of Robert Lowell and Paul Engle’s correspondences and handwritten letters are housed in the Special Collection at the University of Iowa Main Library. These letters discuss a wide range of topics, including Lowell’s teaching offers at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, discussions on John Berryman and Allen Tate, and Lowell’s Guggenheim.

All of these letters can be requested to view at the Special Collections on the 3rd floor at the Main Library on campus. Plan your Visit