Cane is a literary masterpiece of Jean Toomer, a prominent American poet and novelist in the 20th century and also an im?portant figure in Harlem Renaissance. This is a creative work which combines poems with short stories and drama and which has been widely acknowledged as the first modernist literary work in African American literature. It has no fixed point of view, no com?plete plot but an organic mixture of the fragments of poems, short stories and drama. Toomer's poems have special artistic features such as the cubic presentation of images, strong emotion and ambiguity combined with multi-layer of reality. Meanwhile they func?tion a lot in making the short stories more convincing, in displaying the ghetto pastoral mode, in putting forward the essence of Har?lem Renaissance and so on. Poems function as the distillation for Cane. They are the finishing point of the whole work.
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