The film begins with Frost opening the gate of his home in rural Vermont, while President John F. Kennedy praises Frost in his speech from Frost's March 1962 Congressional Gold Medal ceremony. "The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the lost champion of the individual mind and sensibility, against an intrusive society and officious state. The great artist is thus a solitary figure. He has, as Frost says, 'A lover's quarrel with the world.'" Frost admits he was going to call his 1944 poem "A Lover's Quarrels with the World," but then realized he really had one long sustained quarrel with the world.
Clarke and Hughes recorded Frost's speeches and meetings with students at Sarah Lawrence and Amherst colleges. While comfortable in front of an audience and in close quarters with the students, Frost seems a little ill at ease with the presence of a camera crew, even making fun of himself being filmed, proclaiming it "a false picture that presents me as always digging potatoes or saying my own poems." Using hand-held cameras to allow the viewer to feel that they are with Frost, the directors showed the poet puttering around his house and garden, doing common things like boiling water as he speaks of his childhood in San Francisco, attending Democratic meetings in a saloon with his father, who died when Frost was only twelve, his attempts at being a reporter, and then becoming a poet at the age of 40. Frost's sense of humor is apparent as he makes fun of his own work and how others interpreted it, delighting the students by admitting that he wrote one of his best poems standing on his head in a hotel. Never write to pay a bill, he warns them, "because you probably won't. [...] The only conscious thought I had [while writing] was "this seems to be going pretty good."
Film Quarterly called Robert Frost: A Lover's Quarrel with the World "An effective, moving document of a man in the last few months of his life, a man who appeared much in public (as the semi-official poet laureate of the Kennedy Administration) but whose private side was not well known." The film is not a biography of the man in any real sense, but more a master's class in writing from one of the most beloved poets of the 20th century. It gives us a rare chance to hear a writer read his own work and explain his own techniques, often in a self-deprecating manner. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognized the film's value with the Best Documentary Feature Oscar in 1964. Forty-three years later, the Academy Film Archive, in partnership with the UCLA Film and Television Archive, chose Robert Frost: A Lover's Quarrel with the World as one of its preservation projects for that year.
by Lorraine LoBianco
SOURCES:
https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/screenings/robert-frost-lovers-quarrel-world-1963
Internet Movie Database
http://www.oscars.org/academy-film-archive/preserved-projects?title=robert+frost&filmmaker=&category=All&collection=All
http://www.projectshirley.com/rfrost_about.html
