Opaque and lyrical, Cane was much influenced by the imagists…. [The women of the first section are] isolated, suffering from impossible longings, doomed to live out their disappointments in men, or sustained by withdrawal, by sullen defiance—these characters, and their circumstances, are made vivid in a few, sudden strokes…. The characters are not full in the usual sense. Toomer is more interested in the drift of feelings, in elevated portraits of common events….

There is nostalgia for a natural and instinctive way of life in Cane. The second section contains six stories taking in the black life of Washington and Chicago, cities filled with repressed, frustrated souls. The contrast between the rural and the urban seems somewhat sentimental, but Toomer's language is sufficiently distant….

Here, too, irresolute, indolent women slip from man to man; irritated young men come to see the impossibility of getting what they want by conforming to conventional white values; a black man, self-conscious and apologetic to the outside world when he is attracted to a white woman, loses her; men and women are fearful of expressing love and lose it. A recurring theme of this section is how respectability, for middle-class blacks, is a kind of paralysis, an inhibition that results in self-denial….

When writing of the South, Toomer was a detached observer. In the city sketches he draws more on his own experience, and many of the male protagonists are reflections of an inflated image of himself. The long final section of Cane, "Kabnis" is an allegorical attempt to fuse the two themes of the Southland's naturalness and the repressed nature of an educated, northern black, Ralph Kabnis…. Hope is apparently represented by the strong-willed Lewis, also a northern black in search of his identity. Unlike Kabnis, he is able to leave the South rather than sink into it, able to learn from what he has seen and depart, as Toomer did in real life….

[Toomer] does not conceive of sex as exotic, demonic, or decadent. Cane does not have the appeal of the illicit; the characters are not having fun that will be paid for later. The pessimism here is so strong that even the seductions are solemn. There is a peculiar innocence in Cane which supports the yearning, elaborate language, the saturation in a wistful sensuality. (p. 34)

Cane, unlike most books of the period, is a psychological novel rather than a sociological one. Intimacy is seen as a path toward spiritual completion, and everyone in Cane is haunted by the wish to achieve some harmonious, perfected state. Life is seen and understood from the inside. The conflicts are internal, the rules of society merely assumed…. [It] reads like an hommage to the lost ways that were so attuned to "the orthodoxies of the body," as Kenneth Burke once called a fundamental aspect of black folk life.

Toomer was something of a mysterious figure to his friends, and perhaps this obscurity accounts for his legend…. The Wayward and the Seeking does much toward increasing our understanding of him. Included in this volume are excerpts from previously unpublished autobiographies …; there short stories …; two experimental dramas in an Expressionistic style; twelve poems; and selections from Toomer's privately printed book of aphorisms and maxims, Essentials (1931). It must be said, however, that the quality of the work is disappointing. The untutored genius of Cane seems here more like a chagrined auto-didact.

Toomer attempted several autobiographies, each with a different thematic emphasis. [Editor Darwin T. Turner] has drawn from these documents and arranged them in such a way as to form a coherent story of Toomer's life up to the publication of Cane. (pp. 34-5)

Toomer became an ardent disciple of Georges Gurdjieff…. It is Gurdjieff who has most influenced the tone of the autobiographical pieces. Toomer aspires to be, like Gurdjieff, the teacher, the guide, the sage, and this ends in much posturing, in a romantic imagining of himself and his family.

Moreover, the autobiographical passages make strange demands on the reader's patience and willingness to believe….

There is something very sad too in Toomer's idealized portrait of himself. He was never able to make an agreeable or interesting protagonist of himself…. Toomer apparently was certain that there were important lessons for everyone in his experience, but it is not clear what these were, especially as the pall of Gurdjieff hung more and more over the page. The autobiographies sag with tedious descriptions of Toomer's young life, his obsession with his transformation from an alert, clever, inquisitive, mischievous, popular boy to the morbid, sensitive iconoclast, thrilled and sickened by the discoveries of sex, anxious for an ennobling mission. There are intriguing references to domestic troubles …, but Toomer is self-servingly reticent. He concentrates on himself, on his path toward enlightenment and Gurdjieff, his "mission."

Still, one can piece together some clues, particularly to the emotional strain he must have suffered as a boy. (p. 35)

The experiences that Toomer recounts of his life after high school strike a thoroughly contemporary note in what they reveal of his restlessness. [He relocated often and returned to Washington several times, only to leave again.]… Finally, Toomer decided to remain in Washington until his writing "lifted him out."

It did so with Cane. But the three stories included in The Wayward and the Seeking reveal the difficulties Toomer had with his writing after Cane. "Withered Skin of Berries," composed early in his career, is in the style of Cane, a lyrical exploration of a woman's inner life, her search for love, her confusion over the attentions of both a white and a black man. "Winter on Earth" is a sort of prose poem about wintry austerity and desolation. "Mr. Costyve Duditch" is the least successful story, a clumsily rendered narrative about a lonely and foolish man. Toomer attempts to bring ideas from Gurdjieff into his work, though it is not clear how Toomer interpreted his ideas beyond vague allegorical representations. (pp. 35-6)

Toomer's work after Cane concentrates on themes of spiritual liberation, free development of mind, body, and soul, and the need for psychological reform. He also turned away explicitly from racial subjects. Yet the subtlety of his prose was lost—not so much because Toomer no longer wrote about blacks as because he was didactically urging his readers to strive toward a higher consciousness…. The plays ["Natalie Mann and "The Sacred Factory"] show the same unfortunate tendency as the short prose works: an urge to preach. Toomer tries to create messianic young men who will educate the feelings of trusting females. But his dramatic gifts were not equal to his desire to portray the struggle for self-knowledge and freedom….

Though Toomer became disillusioned with Gurdjieff after various scandals, he never abandoned the philosophy and even headed several Gurdjieff groups across the country. In his fiction after Cane Toomer tried to convey his vision as a missionary. Much of the fiction was autobiographical, or had characters modeled on himself, and none of it worked. Even his most direct expressions in philosophical tracts and poems were failures….

The problem Toomer's work presents is not so much his attitude toward race—his ideas came from improvisation, the accommodation a passionately private person tried to make with the world. The problem, the sadness of Toomer, was that his lyrical gift could not hold his free-fall into philosophy. Toomer did not accept the limits of choice imposed by the tragedies of history and became a propagandist. He could not name the thing he longed to escape and retreated into a vestal masochism not unlike that of the little black boy in the lines of Blake. Once, however, during his quest for grace, Toomer suffered the sea change and had his transfiguring moment, which produced Cane. (p. 36)