Robert Frost, Capitalist Rituals, and the Working-Class Sacred

This paper analyzes Robert Frost's canonical poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" in relation to two competing forces: capitalism and the sacred. Frost's poetry criticizes the destructive rituals of capitalism, both for workers and ecologies, and moreover, explores how moments of radical possibility emerge unexpectedly in the form of the sacred, a sacred I specify as the "working-class sacred." This paper reads Frost's poem in dialogue with Heidegger's contemporaneous Being and Time and the theology of Simone Weil. As these disparate thinkers disclose, the sacred becomes an important force and form in revealing class inequalities and moreover, in gesturing towards futures delinked from such class-based violences.