Opaque and lyrical, Cane was much influenced by the imagists…. [The women of the first section are] isolated, suffering from impossible longings, doomed to live out their disappointments in men, or sustained by withdrawal, by sullen defiance—these characters, and their circumstances, are made vivid in a few, sudden strokes…. The characters are not full in the usual sense. Toomer is more interested in the drift of feelings, in elevated portraits of common events….
There is nostalgia for a natural and instinctive way of life in Cane. The second section contains six stories taking in the black life of Washington and Chicago, cities filled with repressed, frustrated souls. The contrast between the rural and the urban seems somewhat sentimental, but Toomer's language is sufficiently distant….
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