Daily Inspiration Quote by Anatole Broyard

Rome isn’t just beautiful, Broyard implies; it’s overqualified for its day job. Calling it “a poem pressed into service as a city” turns urban space into literature conscripted by history. The verb “pressed” does the heavy lifting: it suggests coercion, utility, even a kind of wear. Poems aren’t supposed to manage traffic, sewage, tourism, empires. Yet Rome has had to. The line flatters the city’s aesthetic excess while admitting the burden of being endlessly functional - and endlessly interpreted.

Broyard, a critic who made a career out of turning taste into insight, aims at something more pointed than postcard rapture. He’s describing a place where meaning is structural: the ruins don’t merely decorate the present; they draft it. In Rome, style is not icing. It’s infrastructure. That’s why the metaphor works: poetry is compressed language, dense with allusion and resonance; Rome is compressed time, a palimpsest where pagan columns, papal power, and modern life occupy the same sentence.

The subtext is also about spectatorship. To experience Rome is to be recruited into reading it. You don’t just visit; you interpret, you compare, you project narratives onto stone. “Pressed into service” hints at the cost of that demand: when a city is too symbolic, it risks becoming an exhibit, a stage set for other people’s longings. Broyard manages, in one sly, elegant turn, to praise Rome’s lyricism while diagnosing its fate: condemned, by its own beauty, to never be merely ordinary.