Influential, original, unusual, lyrical - but a great work of literature? : Cane

Feeling a little guilty here for suggesting Jean Toomer's "Cane" for book group, though we'll see, the group never ceases to surprise me with the variety of opinions and enthusiasms that we come up with and express - still, my nearly complete reading of Cane, for me, shows that, yes, it was influential on both the Harlem renaissance and on southern regionalists such as Faulkner, but today it's more like a curiosity or a relic than a great work of literature, or of fiction. The 2nd section, set in black communities in the North, mostly DC, is the weakest of the 3 - each of the little sketches is a potential story, but they don't have the narrative qualities of most stories, they just establish a character or a situation and then abandon it. Would these really be so famous were it not for the fact that so little had been written by and about American blacks at that time? One of the pieces, about a black man who, to a degree, passes for white, in Chicago (perhaps at U of Chicago?), double-dates with a white friend - there's a lot of potential for a story or even a novel here, but it's left undeveloped - every time the plot thickens, so to speak, Toomer abandons the story line for a passage of lyric poetry. The third section is, for the most part, written in dialogue, much like a play. It's the most conventional part of the book: about a group of black men in a small Georgia town, two of whom have moved down from the North, one as a teacher, the other (Lewis) I'm not sure - but the community wants him to leave, threatens him. This could be staged well as a play, I think. We'll see how it goes. Unlike with many books, I will definitely read the preface and maybe some other pieces to see what others have to say about Cane - maybe I'm missing something.