" . . . though I've been pretty uneasy since 1896," an 88-year-old Robert Frost quips in 1963 during his namesake documentary, inexplicably subtitled A LOVER'S QUARREL WITH THE WORLD. This Portrait of a Poet as an Old Man features countless fawning reaction shots of then-young Sarah Lawrence and Amherst College coeds raptly getting off on Frost's Geriatric Guttural Gobble-Gobbles. (Many, if not most of these Beatnik Generation chicks voted to overrule the sane Millennial Choice and elevate a possible KGB spy into their role model Jackie Kennedy's walk-in closets.) But perhaps it is Robert E. Lee--for whom Robert Lee Frost says he was named--who rolled over in his grave to hear Rhymester Bob declare that rival poet Ezra Pound should have been shot for treason after ordering some spumoni from Mussolini. (Of course, "rebel" insurgent leader Bob Lee the First was NOT gunned down by a firing squad for leading a traitorous band of war criminals resulting in half a million U.S. Citizens being murdered, but was made the post-war president of the sort of university that Bob Lee the Second frequented in order to pay his utility bills.) But rest assured, Mr. Frost tells us here that he definitely knows the purpose of hemlock trees.
