The New Negro by Alain LeRoy Locke — Read

An August letter from Jean Toomer was waiting for Locke when he reached Washington that fall of 1922 and forecast his future role in African American affairs. "I liked your criticism," Toomer wrote. "The cocoon is both light and intense. Dickerman has not returned the Ms. but there is no hurry. Little Review has the original."1 In addition to serious, sympathetic criticism of his poetry, Locke had provided Toomer a sense that he was important as an intellectual and a human being. That Toomer valued Locke's appreciativeness runs through almost all of his correspondence with Locke, but is expressed in a letter to Georgia Douglas Johnson in contrast to his treatment at the hands of Du Bois:

Yesterday I called up Dr. Dubois. At first he didn't remember me, even after mentioning the fact that you and he had talked of me. In fact it wasn't until I chanced to mention my hike up here, that the light burst-or rather filtered through-it wasn't a very strong light-He ended up by saying that if I would send some of my stuff to the office he would be glad to look it over. Now I really had expected something more. Any editor would have said as much as that. Anyone with two ounces of curiosity (literary or otherwise) in his make up would rather like to look over new material. I had thought he wanted to get in touch with me, even possibly to know me. Does he expect to do so by looking at my writings? If I were mature he could expect to see the man in the writer. But of an immature youngster? Why no more than a chick can truly express himself within his skill. No, it will be some years before Jean Toomer the thinker, the feeler, the man in love with life in toto, passions, vices, sorrows, despairs-all of life, will be able to put half what is in him on the cool surface of a white sheet of paper. That is art. And as yet I am far from the finished artist.