SOURCE: “Cane: Hermeneutics of Form and Consciousness,” in Jean Toomer and the Prison-House of Thought: A Phenomenology of the Spirit, The University of Massachusetts Press, 1993, pp. 33-62.

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

The Structure of Language: Metaphor and Metonymy

In his foreword to the 1923 edition of Cane, Waldo Frank properly locates the pulse of Toomer's Symbolist-Modernist aesthetic, heralding him as “a poet in prose.” In describing his own writing, Toomer corroborates Frank's assessment: “As for writing—I am not a romanticist. I am not a classicist nor a realist, in the usual sense of those terms. I am an essentialist. Or, to put it in other words, I am a spiritualizer, a poetic realist. This means two things. I try to lift facts, things, happenings to the planes of rhythm, feeling, and significance. I try to...