Quoting Poetry within a Paper
using MLA Documentation
(MLA Handbook, 6th Edition)
Updated 3/21/05

The rules for poetry differ from the rules for quoting prose in two key ways:

Quoting 1, 2 or 3 lines of poetry. You can quote three or fewer lines of poetry without having to place the lines in a block quote. Use quotation marks. Use a slash to indicate the break between lines. Put the line numbers in parentheses. Place the period at the end of the line number(s):.


Heaney directly compares poetry writing to the digging his ancestors did: "Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I'll dig with it" (29-31).

Quoting 4 or more lines of poetry. If you quote four or more lines of poetry, you need to block indent the poem ten spaces on the left margin.


The author, David Bottoms, is wise to the fact that men often use sports to communicate their feelings. The persona of the poem, however, takes years to realize his father's message. Once he realizes the importance of sports to their relationship, he sends a message back to his father:

and I never learned what you were laying down.
Like a hand brushed across the bill of a cap,
let this be the sign
I'm getting a grip on the sacrifice. (20-23)

Do not use ellipses if you start quoting a poem midline. If you want to start quoting in the middle of a line of poetry, just add indentions to indicate the text is only a partial line. Do not use ellipses points (. . .).


McDonald paints a picture of a family in pain, but he uses images that usually show up in cozier circumstances, such as children reading the comics:

                        At dawn
        we folded the quilts
        and funnies, crept softly
        through our chores. (13-16)

If you remove words from the middle of a line, DO use an ellipses to represent the missing text.


As a boy, the persona visited his grandfather in the fields: "Once I carried him milk. . . . / He straightened up / To drink it" (Heaney 19-21).

If you remove one or more full line, use a line of ellipses to indicate the omission.


The persona in Hayden's poem would wake to hear the fire his father started before dawn:

Sundays too my father got up early
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress. (1, 6-8)

Put line numbers after citing several single words. If you quote several words or phrases from throughout a poem, list the line numbers after each word.


Roethke uses a variety of words in "My Papa's Waltz" that indicate physical violence, words such as "death" (3), "battered" (9), "scraped" (12), "beat" (13), and "hard" (14).

For one word, put the line number at the end. Just as when quoting a single word of a prose work, put line numbers at the end of a sentence if quoting only one word.


When Heaney uses a simile to compare his pen to a  "gun," he creates a startling image (2).

 For more information on quoting poetry, please visit the Academic Support Center in Knutti 114.