Joseph Langland Papers

Background on Joseph Langland

Joseph Thomas Langland was born in Spring Grove, Minn., on February 16, 1917, one of nine children of Charles M. Langland and Clara Elizabeth Hille, and the grandson of Norwegian immigrants. Raised mostly on his family's farm in northeastern Iowa, Langland earned an associate's degree from Santa Ana College in California in 1936 and continued his education at the University of Iowa, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1940 and a master's degree in 1941 through the famed Iowa Writers Program.

Already a published poet by the time he received his degree, Langland was rewarded with a position as an English instructor at Dana College in Blair, Nebraska, even as war clouds loomed. As the school year progressed, he debated whether to enlist to secure a more favorable berth or await the draft, and by the end of the school year, his choice was made for him. Permitted to finish out the year, Langland applied for admission to the Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard, but was disqualified from each by near-sightedness. Still determined to enlist, or at least to serve in some significant capacity, he managed to get into the US army as a buck private in August 1942 and was assigned for training with the 379th Infantry Regiment at Camp Swift, Texas.

As Langland's military commitments deepened, his relationship with his fiancee, Judith Gail Wood, accelerated. A 1937 graduate of Massachusetts Agricultural College from Weymouth Heights, Mass., Wood had met Langland at the Bread Loaf Writers Workshop during the summer 1940, and two had grown close in an epistolary relationship, seeing each other at Bread Loaf during the summers. In Texas, Langland's talents were quickly recognized by the Army and with strong scores on aptitude tests, he earned rapid promotion through the non-commissioned ranks and by the fall, 1942, tested into Officers' Candidate School at Fort Benning, Ga., going from there to Camp Wolters, Tex., to train new recruits.

At Camp Wolters on June 26, 1943, Joseph and Judy Langland were married, and she joined him in Texas until the fall, when he ordered to Fort Custer, Mich., for training in military policing and civil administration. Shortly after, Judy enrolled for training as a nurse.

By spring, after much delay, Langland was in England. He would serve with Civil Affairs and military governance units in the European Theater, earning an EAME Theater Medal with four bronze stars, American Theater Medal, and a Victory Medal, rising to the rank of Captain. He was among the troops that opened the concentration camps in the spring of 1945. His younger brother Harold also served; he was killed in action in the Philippines on May. Langland had a chapbook of poetry, For Harold, printed for his family for Christmas in 1945 (it was reissued in 2003 for Harold's 60th high school reunion). Langland returned from his army service in March 1946, and his eldest child, Joseph, Jr., was born that year two days after Christmas, followed by Elizabeth in 1948 and Paul in 1951.

After the war, Langland returned to teaching, first on a part-time basis at the University of Iowa (1946-1948), then at the University of Wyoming (1948-1959), although the 1950s saw him traveling and writing extensively. He had a Ford Faculty Fellowship in the Humanities at Harvard and Columbia (1953-1954) and an Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Fellowship (1955-1956), which took him to Italy, and he had published his first book of poems, The Green Town (1956), a finalist for the National Book Award, before arriving at the English department of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1959. That year, the Massachusetts Review was founded, and Langland was active in its early years as both a poetry editor and a contributor.

In the early 1960s, Langland was recorded by the Library of Congress and by Folkways Records reading his own work, and appeared on ABC’s television program "Meet the Professor" on January 6, 1963. His book The Wheel of Summer won the Melville Cane Award, given by the Poetry Society of America, and he received a National Council of the Arts grant in 1966 and took a year's sabbatical from UMass. He founded UMass's MFA Program for Poets and Writers in 1964 and for six years served as its director. His wife, Judith, was the first woman (and second person) to earn an MFA from UMass. She had begun studying art in earnest while the family was in Wyoming and continued when they moved to Amherst, receiving her degree in 1966. She continued to study painting, printmaking, and ceramics, and to achieve renown as a painter.

Energetic and a passionate advocate for poetry, Joseph Langland organized visits to campus by many noteworthy poets, including the weeklong March Moratorium Poetry Festival in 1970 which featured poets including Donald Hall, David Ignatow, James Tate, Kenneth Koch, Robert Bly, Phyllis Janowitz, and Senator Eugene McCarthy. In 1974, Langland received an honorary degree from Luther College in Iowa. He was acting director of the MFA program for the 1978-1979 academic year, until he retired in 1979 and assumed emeritus status. He continued to be active writing and giving lectures and readings at colleges and universities around the world.

Prolific and widely acclaimed, Langland contributed to magazines including The New Yorker, The Nation, the Atlantic, The Paris Review, The Hudson Review, and Poetry, and many other popular and literary publications. His poems have been collected in numerous books as well as anthologized, and some of his work was set to music by composers including Philip Bezanson, Elliot Schwartz, and others. In 1985, Langland was named a Living Art Treasure in Literature for the New England Arts Biennial.

Judith Langland died on May 20, 1997. Joseph Langland died on April 9, 2007, at the age of 90.