MLA Poetry Citation

If you quote part or all of a single line of verse that does not require special emphasis, put it in quotation marks within your text. You may also incorporate two or three lines in this way, using a slash with a space on each side ( / ) to separate them. 

Bradstreet frames the poem with a sense of mortality: “All things within this fading world hath end” (1).

Reflecting on the “incident” in Baltimore, Cullen concludes, “Of all the things that happened there / That’s all that I remember” (11-12).

Verse quotations of more than three lines should begin on a new line. Unless the quotation involves unusual spacing, indent each line one inch from the left margin and double-space between lines, adding no quotation marks that do not appear in the original. A parenthetical reference for a verse quotation set off from the text follows the last line of the quotation (as in quotations of prose); a parenthetical reference that will not fit on the line should appear on a new line, flush with the right margin of the page. 

Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room” is rich in evocative detail:

It was winter. It got dark

early. The waiting room

was full of grown-up people,

arctics and overcoats,

lamps and magazines. (6-10)

A line that is too long to fit within the right margin should be continued on the next line and the continuation indented an additional quarter inch. You may reduce the indention of the quotation to less than one inch from the left margin if doing so will eliminate the need for such continuations. If the spatial arrangement of the original lines, including indention and spacing within and between them, is unusual, reproduce it as accurately as possible.