“The Dar al-Mu'allimin al-'Aliyah (Baghdad Teachers College) was a focal point for the nationalist movement against the military alliances and the feudalism prevailing during those years,” writes 'Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati (d. 1999) in his autobiography Springs of the Sun (1999). “It was also a Tower of Babel for different ideologies: Salafist, religious, and progressive,” he continues, also mentioning that the College brought together a wide variety of young men from poor, rural backgrounds and young women from well-to-do families. Pioneers of modernist poetry in Arabic, which got its start in Iraq during the late 1940s and 1950s, honed their craft in this “mixed” environment. In addition to al-Bayati, famed poets Badr Shakir al-Sayyab (d. 1964), Nazik al-Mala'ikah (d. 2007), Sa'di Yusuf (b. 1934), Sulayman al-'Isa (d. 2013), Lami'ah 'Abbas 'Imarah (b. 1929), and Buland al-Haydari (d. 1996), among others, attended the Dar, which provided them with a new sort of space to explore the perils and possibilities of Iraqi modernity. This paper gives us a glimpse of how young Iraqi poets got to know each other at the College’s hanut (canteen), where, for instance, al-Bayati invited al-Sayyab to share a cup of tea so they could while away the day reading poetry and skipping class. Although these young poets did take advantage of their coursework as well to learn about English and Arabic literature—among other subjects—they often also experienced a political awakening at the Dar. Al-Sayyab, for instance, recalls his involvement with the Communists taking off while attending. The Dar brought together a wide swath of Iraqi society and provided a venue for interactions between people of different ideological and class backgrounds, a mixture that had a lasting impact on the ways poetry was written in Iraq and the subjects it took up. By investigating how the poets of the Dar recall their poetic formation through interactions with other poets, students, and teachers, I argue that the Baghdad Teachers College offered a space for the elaboration of a new poetry and a new poetics in Iraq. The Dar thus played an important part in the history of modern (and particularly modernist) Arabic poetry more broadly.