[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 Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Donald B. Gibson (copyright © 1973 by Prentice-Hall, Inc.; reprinted by permission of Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey), Prentice-Hall, 1973, pp. 1-17.