Love & Passion Quote by Martin C. Smith

The flex here is quiet, almost domestic: not a podium-announcement of erudition, but a bedside habit. A "book of poetry by the bed" frames reading as intimacy, something you return to in the half-lit hours when attention is soft and defenses are down. Smith isn’t just telling you he reads poetry; he’s staging a relationship to it, the way some people keep a glass of water or a phone within reach. Poetry becomes a nightly ritual, a private calibration of language before sleep.

Then he sharpens the signal: "one of these big collections". That phrase does two jobs at once. It acknowledges the slight absurdity of the doorstop anthology while also positioning it as a personal canon-in-a-single-volume, a portable tradition. The subtext is continuity and self-education: you don’t need a syllabus if the thing is right there, accumulating meaning by proximity and repetition.

"Back to the Greeks and Romans" adds a cultural spine. It’s not name-dropping so much as claiming lineage, implying that whatever Smith writes now is in conversation with an old, durable machine of metaphor, myth, and argument. There’s also a democratic impulse buried in the scale of it: the classics not as museum pieces but as bedside companions, accessible in the most ordinary setting. In an era where reading competes with endless feeds, the quote subtly argues for depth by showing it as lifestyle, not virtue-signaling: the past kept close enough to turn a page without getting out of bed.