LIKE HIS PRECURSOR Walt Whitman, Jean Toomer contained multitudes. By turns he was a free-thinking rationalist, a practitioner of Physical Culture, a vitalist, a mystical disciple of George Gurdjieff, and a Quaker. Toomer’s great work Cane (1923) displays a similar plurality: it contains stories, sketches, expressionist drama, lyric poems and graphics (arcs approaching but never completing a circle). Its settings – rural Georgia, Chicago, Washington DC – are as variable as its moods, which range from elegy to satire. I will argue that the most consequential vacillation in Cane concerns Toomer’s disposition towards the African American spirituality that it dramatises.

In a letter to his friend Waldo Frank, Toomer commended the ‘violen[t]’ emotional ‘powe[r]’ he found in rural Black churches. ‘Their religious emotion’, he wrote, is ‘very near the sublime’. Even so, he added, ‘[t]heir theology is a farce (Christ is so immediate)’. The two judgements seem incongruous: the sublime evokes wonder, farce provokes derision. If ‘the sublime’ names a process in which sensuous apprehension gives way to supersensual transcendence, how can a religion of immediacy court the sublime? By ‘farce’, Toomer can only mean that a properly transcendent reality (Christ) has been absurdly domesticated, so as to become fully available to sensation.

A short sketch, the tonally ambiguous ‘Calling Jesus’, elucidates Toomer’s meaning. Its centre is a ‘calling’ woman who imagines two figures: Jesus and a lover who will rescue her. As she calls, these become one figure: the dream of ‘Some one’ who comes to comfort her and who is ‘soft as a cotton boll brushed against the milk-pod cheek of Christ […] soft as the bare feet of Christ moving across bales of southern cotton’ (56). The biblical Christ – who allowed his body to be humiliated and broken – is replaced by a confected Christ, a pliant object of wish-fulfilment. Whether of cheek or foot, the image of cotton inevitably conjures the commodity that drove Black oppression.

This chapter explores Wallace Stevens’s understanding of the secular condition and the terms he cultivated to describe it. Familiar words from Stevens’s lexicon—“reality,” “imagination,” “the earth,” “repetition”—are linked to his vision of secularity. Mutter argues that this vision of the secular is highly dramatic: though Stevens viewed secularity as a condition of both deprivation and liberation, he transforms loss into a tragic theater in which the self is thrown into hostile territory and must depend on its own resources. The chapter suggests that while Stevens was enticed by the secular model of the real as a domain of neutral, impersonal fact, as his career progressed he increasingly recognized that secular reality was itself an imaginative construal. This recognition is linked to Stevens’s effort to rehabilitate, for his secular anthropology, the imaginative human capacities that historically generated religious ideas. Finally, the chapter elaborates Stevens’s understanding of play as a central mode of his secularism. Play reconciles the secular values of freedom and sensuousness with the discordant necessity of the world. Mutter concludes by observing an ongoing tension in Stevens’s view of desire between the good of immanence and the need for transcendence.