Editing Randall Jarrell (section)

==Biography==
===Youth and education===
Jarrell was a native of [[Nashville, Tennessee]]. He attended [[Hume-Fogg High School]] where he "practiced tennis, starred in some school plays, and began his career as a critic with satirical essays in a school magazine."<ref name="Burt">Burt, Stephen. ''Randall Jarrell and His Age''. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.</ref> He received his B.A. from [[Vanderbilt University]] in 1935. While at Vanderbilt, he edited the student humor magazine ''The Masquerader'', was captain of the tennis team, made [[Phi Beta Kappa]] and graduated ''[[magna cum laude]]''. He studied there under [[Robert Penn Warren]], who first published Jarrell's criticism; [[Allen Tate]], who first published Jarrell's poetry; and [[John Crowe Ransom]], who gave Jarrell his first teaching job as a Freshman Composition instructor at [[Kenyon College]] in [[Gambier, Ohio]]. Although all of these Vanderbilt tutors were  involved with the conservative [[Southern Agrarians|Southern Agrarian movement]], Jarrell did not become a supporter of the Agrarians himself. According to [[Stephanie Burt]], "Jarrell&mdash;a devotee of [[Karl Marx|Marx]] and [[W.H. Auden|Auden]]&mdash; embraced his teachers' literary stances while rejecting their politics."<ref name="Burt"/> He also completed his Master's degree in English at Vanderbilt in 1937, beginning his thesis on [[A. E. Housman]] (which he completed in 1939).

When Ransom left Vanderbilt for Kenyon College in Ohio that same year, a number of his loyal students, including Jarrell, followed him to Kenyon. Jarrell taught English at Kenyon for two years, coached [[tennis]], and served as the resident faculty member in an undergraduate dormitory that housed future writers [[Robie Macauley]], [[Peter Matthew Hillsman Taylor|Peter Taylor]],<ref>{{cite journal | url=https://www.jstor.org/pss/4337918 | jstor=4337918 | title=Peter Taylor: The Undergraduate Years at Kenyon | last1=McAlexander | first1=Hubert H. | journal=The Kenyon Review | date=1999 | volume=21 | issue=3/4 | pages=43–57 }}</ref> and poet [[Robert Lowell]]. Lowell and Jarrell remained good friends and peers until Jarrell's death. According to Lowell biographer [[Paul Mariani]], "Jarrell was the first person of [Lowell's] own generation [whom he] genuinely held in awe" due to Jarrell's brilliance and confidence even at the age of 23.<ref>Mariani, Paul. ''Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell''. New York: Norton, 1994.</ref>

===Career===
Jarrell went on to teach at the [[University of Texas at Austin]] from 1939 to 1942, where he began to publish criticism and where he met his first wife, Mackie Langham. In 1942 he left the university to join the [[United States Army Air Forces]].<ref>[https://airforce.togetherweserved.com/usaf/servlet/tws.webapp.WebApps?cmd=ShadowBoxProfile&type=Person&ID=120847 Jarrell, Randall, 1st Lieutenant, USAF]</ref> According to his obituary, he "[started] as a flying cadet, [then] he later became a celestial navigation tower operator, a job title he considered the most poetic in the Air Force."<ref name="Randall Jarrell 1965">"Randall Jarrell, Poet, Killed By Car in Carolina." ''The New York Times'' 15 October 1965.</ref> His early poetry, in particular “[[The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner]],” would principally concern his wartime experiences in the Air Force.

The Jarrell obituary goes on to state that "after being discharged from the service he joined the faculty of [[Sarah Lawrence College]] in Bronxville, N.Y., for a year. During his time in New York, he also served as the temporary book review editor for [[The Nation (magazine)|''The Nation'']] magazine". Jarrell was uncomfortable living in the city and "claimed to hate New York's crowds, high cost of living, status-conscious sociability, and lack of greenery."<ref name="Burt"/> He soon left the city for the [[University of North Carolina at Greensboro|Woman's College of the University of North Carolina]] where, as an associate professor of English, he taught modern poetry and "imaginative writing".<ref name="Randall Jarrell 1965"/>

Jarrell divorced his first wife and married Mary von Schrader, a young woman whom he met at a summer writer's conference in Colorado, in 1952.<ref name="Burt"/> They first lived together while Jarrell was teaching for a term at the [[University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign]]. The couple settled at [[Greensboro]] with Mary's daughters from her previous marriage. The couple also moved temporarily to Washington D.C. in 1956 when Jarrell served as the consultant in poetry at the [[Library of Congress]] (a position that later became titled Poet Laureate) for two years, returning to Greensboro and the University of North Carolina after his term ended.

===Depression and death===
Towards the end of his life, in 1963, Stephanie Burt notes: "Randall's behavior began to change. Approaching his fiftieth birthday, he seems to have worried deeply about his advancing age. . . After [[Assassination of John F. Kennedy|President Kennedy was shot]], Randall spent days in front of the television weeping. Sad to the point of inertia, Randall sought help from a [[Cincinnati, Ohio|Cincinnati]] psychiatrist, who prescribed [the antidepressant drug] [[Elavil]]."<ref name="Burt"/> The drug made him [[Mania|manic]] and in 1965, he was hospitalized and taken off Elavil. At this point, he was no longer manic, but he became depressed again. Burt also states that in April ''[[The New York Times]]'' published a "viciously condescending" review by Joseph Bennett of Jarrell's most recent book of poems, ''The Lost World'', which said "his work is thoroughly dated; prodigiousness encouraged by an indulgent and sentimental Mama-ism; its overriding feature is doddering infantilism."<ref>[https://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n05/ian-hamilton/ashamed-of-the-planet Ian Hamilton, "Ashamed of the Planet," ''London Review of Books,'' Vol. 22 No. 5, 2 March 2000, pages 16-17.]</ref> Soon afterwards, Jarrell slashed a wrist and returned to the hospital.<ref name="Burt"/> After leaving the hospital, he stayed at home that summer under his wife's care and returned to teaching at the University of North Carolina that fall.

Then, near dusk on October 14, 1965, while walking along U.S. highway 15-501 near [[Chapel Hill, N.C.]], where he had gone seeking medical treatment, Jarrell was struck by a motorist and killed.<ref name="Randall Jarrell 1965"/> In trying to determine the cause of death, "[Jarrell's wife] Mary, the police, the coroner, and ultimately the state of North Carolina judged his death accidental, a verdict made credible by his apparent improvements in health ... and the odd, sidelong manner of the collision; medical professionals judged the injuries consistent with an accident and not with suicide."<ref name="Burt"/> Nevertheless, because Jarrell had recently been treated for mental illness and a previous [[suicide attempt]], some of the people closest to him were not entirely convinced that his death was accidental and suspected that he had taken his own life.

In a letter to [[Elizabeth Bishop]] about a week after Jarrell's death, [[Robert Lowell]] wrote, "There's a small chance [that Jarrell's death] was an accident. . . [but] I think it was suicide, and so does everyone else, who knew him well."<ref>Lowell, Robert. "To Elizabeth Bishop." 28 October 1965. Letter 464 in The Letters of Robert Lowell. Ed. [[Saskia Hamilton]]. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005. 465.</ref> Jarrell's death being a suicide has since become accepted practically as fact, even by people who were not personally close to him and perpetuated by some writers. [[A. Alvarez]], in his book ''The Savage God'', lists Jarrell as a twentieth-century writer who killed himself, and [[James Atlas]] refers to Jarrell's "suicide" several times in his biography of [[Delmore Schwartz]]. The idea of Jarrell's death being a suicide was always denied by his wife.<ref>Ferguson, Suzanne. "The Death of Randall Jarrell: A Problem in Legendary Biography." ''The Georgia Review'' 37.4 (1983): 866-876.</ref>