The decisive factor in Toomer's life and art was his ambivalence toward his blackness…. ["Cane"] is in fact a poetic celebration of his black identity, all the more poignant for the complicated tensions with which the subject was surrounded….

Toomer's symbol for his blackness is the Southern cane…. Cane represents the sweetness of life. It is connected obviously with sex, with a fullness of emotion, with a sense of soil, of rootedness, of the pain and beauty of the Negro past. It is expressive, moreover, of a deep yearning for the rural South. To read "Cane" is to feel at once the strength of the Negro's Southern heritage. Down home is still the bloody shrine of the black man's heart.

At the same time that he searches for his ethnic roots, Toomer is drawn toward universal values. Primarily a poet, his tradition is the transcendental strain of Walt...