Quoting Poetry

In order to quote poetry in your paper in a proper way, you can follow the requirements below according to MLA rules.

Quoting less than four lines. This quotation does not require special emphasis, put it in quotation mark within your text. If you need to quote two or three lines, you have to use a slash with a blank space before and after it.

Dylan Thomas gives this poem a powerful sense of personification, also called prosopopeia: "The tombstone told when she died" (1).

Robert Bruce addresses his army in Robert Burns´s poem : "Wha for Scotland´s king and law / Freedom´s sword will strongly draw / Freeman stand, or freeman fa´?"  (13-15).

Quoting more than three lines. You should begin on a new line and you need to indent each line ten spaces from the left margin without adding quotation marks.

Tennyson shows us how people remain indifferent to the loss of his friend:

          O well for the fisherman's boy,

          That he shouts with his sister at play!

          O well for the sailor lad,

          That he sings in his boat on the bay! (5-8)

If you need to begin the quotation in the middle of a line you have to write the first word in the same position where it is in the original, That is, you do not have to indent ten spaces and you do not need to use ellipses points:

The Mariner speaks aloud after shooting the albatros:

                            I had killed the bird

          That brought the fog and mist.

          'Twas right, said they, such birds to slay,

          That bring the fog and mist. (99-102)

If you want to remove one or more lines, you need to use a line of points in order to indicate the omission:

Alliteration in the following stanza:

          About, about, in reel and rout

           . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
      
          The water, like a witch's oils,

          Burnt green, and blue and white (45-48).

Source

Gibaldi, Joseph, MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers; The Modern Language Association of America; New York, USA; 2003