“Seventh Street,” set in post-World War I Washington, DC, opens and closes with the same short poem:

The page that is framed by this poem of urban modernity is both lyrical invocation and apostrophe of the black migrants who form a “wedge” of jazz songs and life driven into “the white and whitewashed wood of Washington.” “Seventh Street” is part modernist prose poem that expresses the rhythms and noise of the city of Prohibition, and part meditation on the meaning of migration. At its center is the repeated question, “Who set you flowing? Flowing down the smooth asphalt of Seventh Street, in shanties, brick office buildings, theaters, drug stores, restaurants, and cabarets?”

“Seventh Street” opens the second part of Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), and experimental book that marks the full arrival and a high point of achievement of American ethnic modernism. Published by the prestigious house of Boni and Liveright in 1923, still before Ernest Hemingway’s and William Faulkner’s first important books were to appear, Cane was a powerful contribution to the specific stream of modernism that included Stein’s Three Lives, James Joyce’s Dubliners, and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, though Toomer also was inspired by modern poetry (Hart Crane’s poem The Bridge), Eugene O’Neill’s plays, Waldo Frank’s manifesto Our America, Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings, and Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs. An avid reader, Toomer was drawn to Shaw, Ibsen, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Melville.