SOURCE: “Lifting the Veil: Cane,” in Jean Toomer, Twayne, 1980, pp. 49-98.

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

Cane, published by Boni and Liveright in 1923, was Toomer's first book-length work. His early poetry, short stories, and sketches had been well received by the literary world and Toomer was considered a promising young author. These early pieces had, as Toomer said, sought to extract the beauty from black life and to direct the people's sensitivity and perception to that beauty. Cane is a further attempt to show the beauty in black life in its various stages: the primitive black, the black who had been semiurbanized, and the intellectual black. Structurally, Cane assumes a contrapuntal series of short often enigmatic turns. The text itself is divided into three distinct sections: Section One is set in Georgia and includes six stories concerning women...