In the following essay, Benson and Dillard offer a thematic and stylistic analysis of Cane.

In the following essay, Callahan addresses Toomer's use of American vernacular and song in Cane, particularly his use of spirituals and folk songs.

In the following essay, Foley probes Toomer's racial and class consciousness as expressed in the Washington, D. C. section of Cane.

In the following essay, Jones analyzes Toomer's utilization of and experimentation with myriad literary forms in Cane.

In the following essay, Foley locates one of the actual settings for Cane as the town of Sparta, Georgia, and assesses the impact the place had on Toomer's work and life.

In the following essay, Foley explores Toomer's treatment of economic factors and racial violence in Cane.

In the following essay, McKay interprets the second section of Cane as an exploration of Toomer's urban experience in the North.

In the following essay, Hutchinson contends that the predominant motif of Cane is the author's exploration of his own racial identity.

In the following essay, Scruggs evaluates the influence of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, on Toomer's Cane.

In the following essay, Lindberg discusses Toomer's theories of racial and national identity.

In the following essay, Eldridge discusses the recurring imagery in the first part of Cane, asserting that it functions to unify the overall themes of the work.

In the following essay, Kodat delineates the two camps of Toomer criticism and asserts that the “great strength of Cane lies in Toomer's risky decision to represent racial and gender oppression through modernist literary technique.”

In the following essay, Abbott considers the function of the female characters in Cane, maintaining that they are often the “sites onto which men project their judgments and desires.”

In the following essay, Jung examines the circumstances surrounding the publication of and the critical reaction to “Fern,” and surveys the major themes of the story.

In the following essay, Rice uncovers “a pattern of imagery” in the first and second sections of Cane.

In the following essay, Schultz contends that not only is “Box Seat” integral to the thematic, imagistic, and philosophical unity of Cane, but the story has integrity and significance on its own.

In the following essay, Peckham provides a stylistic analysis of Cane, particularly the way the disparate elements of text work together as a unified whole.

In the following essay, Chase explores Toomer's complex portrayal of women in Cane, maintaining of his female characters that: “Perhaps they are all the same woman, archetypal woman, all wearing different faces, but each possessing an identifiable aspect of womanhood.”

In the following essay, Christensen assesses the flaws in “Withered Skin of Berries” and deems it “an indispensable part of our heritage from the Harlem Renaissance.”

At first sight, Cane seems to be a collection of poems, sketches, stories, and dramatic passages…. The loose structure of the book has induced many critics to discuss the pieces that fit into one of the accepted genres and forget about their function within the whole. In a few cases the tendency to separate Toomer's prose from his poetry led to evaluations of the comparative merits of each, which in turn encouraged discussions whether Toomer should better become a poet or a novelist. In this w...

In the following essay, Whyde investigates Toomer's narrative representation of the body in Cane.

In the following essay, Rusch considers autobiographical aspects of the unpublished story, “Monrovia” and deems the story unique in Toomer's oeuvre.

In the following essay, Jones provides a laudatory assessment of “The Eye,” asserting that the unpublished story “is unique in its evocation of terror in the Gothic tradition.”

In the following excerpt, Bone discusses “Fern,” “Theater,” and “Bona and Paul” as prime examples of Toomer's narrative technique.

In the following essay, Flowers contends that Toomer effectively explores 1920s class division among African Americans in “Box Seat.”

In the following essay, Noyes explicates the major themes of Toomer's short story, “York Beach.”

It is no easy matter to determine the specific share of the poet in the work of Jean Toomer, for the whole process of his thinking, and his art as a narrator, obey the behests of his poetry. His poetic inspiration spreads far beyond his verse writings, and Jean Toomer could neither think, nor tell a tale, nor describe except as a poet. So any attempt to cling to the traditional distinctions between the literary genres would be vain in the case of a writer who, like many other creative artists of his generat...

In the following essay, Reckley emphasizes the thematic and stylistic significance of “Seventh Street” and “Rhobert” in Cane.

The interlocking of man and nature [in Cane] creates a verbal tone-poem which reveals the mystery and spirituality that Toomer was so fond of describing…. [The central images of the book are] dusk, the moment of mystery, equipoise, and deep (purple) feeling; cane, the profound grip into the earth that nurtures life; fermentation, the creative power that gives life purpose. These images are "oracular" through the medium of the prophet-poet, who reveals the mystery of the spiritual life t...

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 nostalg...

Following the publication of Cane, Toomer, convinced by personal experience and extensive reading that "the parts of man—his mind, emotions, and body—were radically out of harmony with each other," discovered the method for unifying these three centers of being in the teachings of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, the "rascal sage." A synthesis of Western science and Eastern mysticism, Gurdjieff's system was a rigorous discipline that taught self-development and c...

Part One [of Cane] shows the South's passionality through its portraits of instinctively natural sexuality, of irrationally embraced tradition and social order, and of the tragedy which erupts when these conflict. Part Two, in contrast, illustrates order rationalized and idolized; machinery, industry, and sophistication have repressed and purged persons of any genuine passion. Despite its also offering tragedy, then, that the South at least experiences the passions of love, lust, anger, and murderous...

The Wayward and the Seeking includes autobiographical selections, short fiction, poetry, two plays, and a number of Toomer's aphorisms and maxims … a representative selection of Toomer's creative efforts between 1924 and the mid-1930s. It is an important work because, for the first time, it provides an opportunity for understanding the relationship between the man and the artist and, by extension, the relationship among the boundaries of personal freedom, social limitations, and the cre...

Cane is not a typical novel. It is, in fact, sui generis—a unique piece of writing in American literature as well as in the entire scope of Third World writing. I suggest that Cane should be regarded as a lyrical novel—a narrative structured by images instead of the traditional unities. Its tripartite structure is developed from a series of thematic tensions: North/South; city/country (with the almost ubiquitous image of the land); past/present; black/white; male/female. Structured by these co...

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 ...

Jean Toomer's career is still wrapped in foggy mystery: he wrote one esoteric work, difficult to grasp, define, and assess; he was associated with one of the more advanced white modernist cults, and adopted and taught Russian mysticism; and then he suddenly declared himself white, and disappeared. His book, Cane (1923), is composed of fourteen prose pieces, ranging from two- and four-page sketches, to "Kabnis," an eighty-three-page nouvelle; and fifteen detached poems set in between. Ab...

[The publication of Cane had an important effect on] practically an entire generation of young Negro writers then just beginning to emerge; their reaction to Toomer's Cane marked an awakening that soon thereafter began to be called a Negro Renaissance. Cane's influence was by no means limited to the joyous band that included Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Eric Walrond, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Rudolph Fisher and their contemporaries of the 'Twenties. Subsequent writing by ...

While Mr. Toomer often tries for puzzling and profound effects, he accomplishes fairly well what he sets out to do, and Cane is not seething … with great inexpressible things bursting to be said, and only occasionally arriving, like little bubbles to the surface of a sea of molten tar…. Mr. Toomer shows a genuine gift for character portrayal and dialogue. In the sketches the poet is uppermost. Many of them begin with three or four lines of verse, and end with the same lines, slightly changed. ...

[In The Wayward and the Seeking] race is unequivocally the overriding preoccupation of Jean Toomer's life: not Blackness or even being a Negro, but having (or having to have) a race at all. For a man who apparently had no more Negro blood than Dumas père or Pushkin, the drop or two that he does, or might have … bedevils his days and his intellect. (p. 1) What makes Toomer's position on race so interesting to speculate on, is the fact that the best work he did came from three mont...

[Although Jean Toomer] considered aesthetics as the proper end of poetry, he created in his poetry and prose a mythical black past to which he explored his connection. As Toomer seems to have sought the roots of race in mysticism and aestheticism, so his relation to blackness seems more of the imagination than of the blood. He translated imagined black experience into forms so idealized as to be little related to reality as commonly conceived. (p. 8) Donald B. Gibson, in his introduction to Mod...