Jed Perl The Urban Mirror: Robert Alter Imagined Cities: Urban Experiences and the Language of the Novel, Yale University Press, 2005?, The New York Times Book Review, 19 June 2005, p. 9
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". . . And if the city gave birth to the panoramic novel, the effort by novelists to catch shifts in consciousness . . . led other writers away from the novel entirely, toward the poem as an epic collage, which in Eliot's Wasteland and Crane's Bridge becomes a formalist's astonishing rubbish heap, designed to hold the fascinating fragments and shards gathered by the walker in the city. One can even argue that if it were not for the city, artists would never have discovered the country, for landscape is a type of painting that was first imagined in cities, and the pastoral is surely one of the most insistently urban of all literary modes.
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". . . if the creation of a city is in some sense an act of the collective imagination, [it will always challenge the artist] . . . how to re-present the city's style and atmosphere and meanings and metaphors . . . The cities of art and literature are cities twice imagined, for the communal creation must be recreated through the singular imagination."