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Summary: Wind is in the cane
Review: It was a product of the Harlem Renaissance. It was published in 1923 in a small edition. Toomer believed that in CANE he was writing of a way of life that was dying. CANE is a collection of poetry and prose. It contains portraits and descriptions. Toomer was something of a detached observer. He questioned the harmonies and values of his society. In the Norton Critical Edition the material at the back of the volume includes biographical and critical information. In an autobiographical section Toomer states that CANE was a swan song. He consciously sought to embody in the work the folk spirit. Before Toomer began to write he thought of becoming a composer. Critic Gorham Munson writes that CANE is the projection of a vivid personality.
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Summary: A MUST-HAVE BOOK; BUY IT
Review: One of the best books I have read. Just don't try to categorize it. Perhaps it is the freedom from a "format" that makes it so creative. He tells little stories about people with such power and reflections on the sexual the spiritual the racial the natural world. It is prose poetry. I have not even finished reading it yet! I urge you to by this edition which includes critical essays on CANE. Not that they can ever truly dissect it -- that's what makes it so great. So, he didn't consider himself black -- probably neither does Michael Jackson -- and he's still a genious. The WORK is what is important.
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Summary: Jean Toomer was not "black" but mixed-caucasian
Review: Readers who call Jean Toomer "black" or "African American" are totally in error. He rejected that racist "one drop" classification and deserves praise and admiration for doing so. Toomer's parents and grandparents were not "black middle class" but looked whiter than many Americans who call themselves "white."
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Summary: Critical!
Review: Thank god this book resurfaced in the 70's... had it not, a treasure would have certainly been lost.
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Summary: Conflicted and Lyrical
Review: There appear to be several tangled threads in CANE that join the three parts of the book together. The first thread unifying the collection of poetry and prose is the way it was put together. In book one you have the narrator observing rural negroes in the south. In book two you have the narrator express-ing the discontent of urban negroes. Then, in book three, you have old Kabnis, a northern negro, trying to escape his pain by returning to his roots in rural Georgia. Coming full-circle. And yet not. Part Two should come first, with its discontented youth, then "Kabnis", then Part One. Why does Toomer choose to progress from spiritual unity to disunity? Is it because the book truly represents a cycle which has no beginning and no end? A clue to this is in two poems, "Reapers" and "Harvest Song". Both are written on related topics, and yet "Reapers" is the first poem of the book, and "Harvest Song" the last. In "Reapers" a rat is injured by a scythe, and yet "the blade, blooded-stained, continues cutting weeds and shade" oblivious to or uncaring of the rat's injuries and pain. In "Harvest Song" the narrator is a reaper who, at the end of the day, with his work still unfinshed, fears his own hunger so much that he distracts himself with pain, "...My pain is sweet...It will not bring me knowledge of my hunger." What, exactly, is it that Toomer's characters hunger for?
Another thread appears to me to be the striving for unity. This desire for unity is expressed in the ways in which the men and women in CANE strive toward unity in their relation-ships. Admittedly, they fail miserably. The women in the book are terribly one-sided--sex objects that are either passive, as with Karintha and Fern and Avey, or active, as with Carma and Louisa and Bona. However, for all their being available physically, the females Toomer portrays in his cameos are untouchable or out of reach spiritually. The men are also one-sided--rational and yet passionate, often overcome by lust and rage. These probably function to demonstrate Toomer's personal views on what men and women are, and how their desires for unity in healthy relation-ships produces a significant amount of pain as a result of their oppositeness.
Pain is yet another thread that unifies the poetry, sketches, stories and drama of CANE. After all is experienced, the pain is what is left, the only significant fruit of their struggles. In Part One, the pain everyone suffers seems to be symbolized by the ever-present cane. The cane, which can cut the skin, must be ground, the juice boiled and cooled, in order to obtain it sweetness. Is the pain which the characters savor the sweetness in their lives? And if so, wouldn't the cane also represent the sweetness (pain) in their lives? In Part Two, which takes place in the urban North, the Negroes live repressed, frustrated, and sadly warped lives. The pain is intellectualized, yet it is still there, doubly so. Is this a result of being separated from the soil--that which is perceived to be source of their spirituality--as well as their failure to form meaningful relationships? The pain in "Kabnis" is more incoherent, the pain of an urban negro who has returned to his roots only to find that he cannot accept them, is alienated by them.
It is impossible to discuss all of the tangled threads that weave CANE into the powerfully moving and unorthodox novel of Toomer's voyage of self-discovery. It is often incoherent, filled with evocative recurrent images, and powerful character sketches that leave the reader unfulfilled, confused, and hungry for more. Perhaps it is Toomer's own hunger, expressed in his writing, that the reader picks up. If there was more to the novel, perhaps one could pin down the more elusive points. Then again, perhaps not.
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Summary: A wonderful little book with great insight
Review: This is perhaps one of my favorite works of literature I've ever read. This piece of literature uses poetry and short stories to portray the vast experiences of Afican-Americans in America. This novel (of sorts) opens your eyes and does so subtly and beautifully through various characters and the experiences they go through or fight against. Although written over fify years ago, Toomer's work relates well to the problems/concerns of race in America today. I feel this should be a required work in studying Modern American Literature and the African-American Experience. If there is a firm "canon" ever established, this should be included.
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Summary: "the question of toomer's race"
Review: Toomer considered race arbitrary. Above all, he considered himself an American. Read this book; or, if nothing else, at least read "Blood-Burning Moon" to experience some extremely intense prose.
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Summary: Truth through Words
Review: Women play a dramatic role throughout Jean Toomer's eyebrow raising novel, Cane. In Cane, Toomer depicts the lives of many women who are misunderstood by the world around them. Through each dramatic story we are introduced to different characters that all tell a story, a story that spells out the racism and virtual element of sadness that has overcome Georgia and everything in it's path. Cane is not only a novel, but also a learning lesson of the changing times and real true to life struggles that innocent victims had to endure. After experiencing cane, we are introduced to another world that we have never known, forever changing our mindset of the world around us. Not only was Cane a dramatic learning tool, but also an irreplaceable piece of literature that will forever remain in our thoughts and our minds generation after generation touching each reader that is lucky enough to have inhaled it's beauty. One of Cane's greatest acheivements is in the way you have to find the beauty within each character through understanding Georgia's mindset. Toomer truly challenges our minds to relate to each and every character, be it man or woman, and understand and appreciate each and every struggle and hardship, and once we can feel their pain we too have a little purple in our hearts.
Rating:
Summary: Truth through Words
Review: Women play a dramatic role throughout Jean Toomer's eyebrow raising novel, Cane. In Cane, Toomer depicts the lives of many women who are misunderstood by the world around them. Through each dramatic story we are introduced to different characters that all tell a story, a story that spells out the racism and virtual element of sadness that has overcome Georgia and everything in it's path. Cane is not only a novel, but also a learning lesson of the changing times and real true to life struggles that innocent victims had to endure. After experiencing cane, we are introduced to another world that we have never known, forever changing our mindset of the world around us. Not only was Cane a dramatic learning tool, but also an irreplaceable piece of literature that will forever remain in our thoughts and our minds generation after generation touching each reader that is lucky enough to have inhaled it's beauty. One of Cane's greatest acheivements is in the way you have to find the beauty within each character through understanding Georgia's mindset. Toomer truly challenges our minds to relate to each and every character, be it man or woman, and understand and appreciate each and every struggle and hardship, and once we can feel their pain we too have a little purple in our hearts.
Rating: 
Summary: "To catch thy plaintive soul, soon gone"
Review: Written back in 1923, CANE is one of the touchstones of African-American writing. Jean Toomer, despite his rather uncertain relationship with the African side of his ancestry, must be recognized as a founder. That said, this is a pale, difficult book, wandering sadly through the tempest-tossed fortunes of African-American life in the first decades of the 20th century. CANE is not for the casual reader, nor for those who want to be fed meaning. You must reflect, add to the text from your own knowledge and experience. The characters appear in pale colors, dressed in weariness and often verging on madness. Blue saxophone tones amidst the fogs of prejudice and blind hatred for all intelligent behavior by a despised minority. What more could a gentle man, human and tender, make of such craziness ? Poetry, broken images that pass slowly, pale by smoke, pale by moonlight, whisper of yellow globes, and decline of that distant hope that someday "they" would learn. Part of this book is poetry, part is prose, and part a strange play about a man named Kabnis ("Sinbad ?) who seems an unlikely traveller on life's roads. It is not a novel in any usual sense of the word, since it is made up of completely disparate parts with no connection other than that they describe the vicissitudes of African-American life in the South and in Washington DC. Plot is absent, as is continuity. This is a volume of ashen portraits, not much flattering. This is a volume worth more for its history than for its literary merit, yet it will touch you if you let it. Not yet published were the forthright descriptions and defiance of Wright, Ellison, Baldwin, and many others. The bold fulminations of Malcolm, the brilliant oratory of King---not even dreamt of. Toomer asks---but through a mist of poetic images, through the circuitous meanderings of the oppressed---what have we done to deserve this fate? Who am I ? No firebrand he. "Wish that I might fly out past the moon/ And curl forever in some far-off farmyard flower." This is hardly rebellion. But he wrote, he dared that. From our so-privileged vantage point of eight decades into the future shall we challenge him, shall we scorn him ? Let's praise him, for he began the trickle that turned into a mighty flood.
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