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. The construction here is musical, too often a little artificially so. The body of the sketch tends to poetry, and to a pattern which begins to lose its effectiveness so soon as one guesses how it is coming out….

[Once] we begin to regard Mr. Toomer's shorter sketches as poetry, many objections to the obscure symbolism and obliqueness of them disappear. There...