Robert Penn Warren was U.S. Poet Laureate twice, the first time from 1944 to 1945, then again from 1986 to 1987. In his first term, he was assigned an office on the northwest corner of the top floor of the Library of Congress, a large room with a small balcony and a magnificent view overlooking the U.S. Capitol. That room continued to be assigned to poets laureate thereafter; in 1950 it was transformed into the Poetry Room.
In a 1944 letter to his Minnesota friends, Huntington and Elizabeth “Bid” Brown, Penn Warren wrote that he and his wife were residing at 2445 Thirty-ninth Street, NW, where they had a roof over their heads, “and everything under it is very ugly and very comfortable.”
