Jean Toomer Reaping Cane

I’m afraid I don’t know much about Jean Toomer. I came across his name in a Clive James review of Camille Paglia’s new book, which by the way sounds intriguing. I had come across Toomer way back when, but haven't thought of him, or read him since. I should have. But Toomer’s book Cane has been ordered and I look forward to its arrival. Robert B. Jones writes of it:

In September 1921 Toomer traveled to Sparta, Georgia, where for two months he served as interim principal of the Sparta Agricultural and Industrial Institute. Living as an African American in the rural South stimulated his racial consciousness, and he used this newly found identification with his racial past to create the poems, prose poems, lyrical narratives, and short stories in his lyrical novel and master-work, Cane (1923). While many critics have credited this work with ushering in the Harlem Renaissance, noting the book's representations of African-American characters and culture, others have located it within the Lost Generation, owing to its literary experimentation, its romantic primitivism, and its critiques of postwar values. Part one of the book presents portraits of six women of the rural South, in a style reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson's gallery of grosteques in Winesburg, Ohio (1919). Part two shifts to the urban North, using paysage moralisé settings in Washington, D.C., and Chicago to depict the modern world as a postwar wasteland. In Part three, "Kabnis," the setting shifts back to the rural South and dramatizes a portrait of an artist struggling to represent the parting soul of the African-American past in art. Robert Bone has noted that Toomer participated on equal terms with Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and T S. Eliot in the creation of a new, modern idiom during the 1920s, and he ranks Cane with Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) in the tradition of the African-American novel.

A poem from the book:

Reapers

Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones
Are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hones
In their hip-pockets as a thing that's done,
And start their silent swinging, one by one.
Black horses drive a mower through the weeds,
And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds.
His belly close to ground. I see the blade.
Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade.

There’s a slight touch of Frost in the first four lines, although the first word telegraphs a change in the rustic tune is about to appear. Its reappearance in line 5 is an alert. And the rat shows up in L6. An amazing poem. I need more.