Toomer, Jean - Robert B. Jones (essay date 1993)

Robert B. Jones (essay date 1993)

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...

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