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. As the poem suggests, it is only by delinking from capitalist conceptions of time and space that the sacred can be revealed. This paper details how Frost's poetry criticizes the destructive rituals of capitalism, both for workers and ecologies, and moreover, how moments of radical possibility emerge unexpectedly in the form of the sacred, a sacred I specify as the "working-class sacred." This paper develops a theory of the working-class sacred in dialogue with Heidegger's contemporaneous Being and Time and the theological work of Simone Weil, especially Weil's work on the theology of attention. All these works, I argue, anticipate what has become periodized as "24-7 Capitalism," and all offer their critique through the prism of the sacred. 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. This project is animated by the following intertwined questions: How can the sacred become a political resource for the current era of global capitalism and ecological collapse? How do we recognize the sacred in the context of class dynamics? Specifically, what does it mean to think about a working-class sacred? And how does the working-class sacred emerge in unpredictable and surprising ways, even in thinkers who profess to be secular?