Many critics have called Frost a poet of survival, and one has famously called him terrifying. Thinking about these two characteristics together, I explore in this essay, “The Terror of Robert Frost,” the possibility he may have been traumatized by capitalism’s ruthless culture.

Coldness is a central term, the coldness of Frost’s imagination when confronted with the death of the vulnerable. The idea of an implied author — a performance of possibilities and, indeed, impossibilities of imaginative response — grounds the close readings that describe this coldness as carried out by the limited focalizations, or points of view, in the poems. Frost seems unable to imagine what it is to feel a loss, and almost blindly to need the audience to experience this inability.

A brief coda connects this argument to the state of literary criticism at the time, embracing the resources of the then-unfashionable symptomatic reading, and, in a nod to the political world of its time (2017), I conclude with an exhortation that Frost’s coldness is not the only imaginative and spiritual option for a white man wounded by capitalist ideology.