I snagged the title of this post from a Robert Lowell poem, “Fall 1961,” which was published in his collection For the Union Dead. It is the poem that contains the relatively famous and unforgettably eerie, arch-Eliotic sentence, “We are like a lot of wild / spiders crying together, / but without tears.” The punning sentence quoted in the title, however, seems to me to express unaccountably well some of the ambivalence about the “age of the crisis of man” which pervades Mark Greif’s new study, already reviewed here thoroughly and insightfully by Patrick Redding and Daniel Wickberg. Greif’s book Read more