Editing Randall Jarrell (section)

===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>