Poem titles are enclosed in quotes. They are neither underlined nor italicized.
Example: Lord Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” reflects the changing roles of women in the Victorian
age.
The rules for poetry differ from the rules for quoting prose in two key ways:
• Poetry requires writers to cite line numbers not page numbers.
• Poetry requires writers to keep line breaks intact.
Quoting 1, 2 or 3 lines of poetry. 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).
Add the word "line" or “lines” in the first citation. On subsequent citations, you
can just use the line number. First time: (Plath line 3), after that: (Plath 3) or (3), if you’ve
already made the name of the poet you’re quoting clear.
Do not change any of the poem’s capitalization or punctuation.
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 (about an inch) on the left margin. Do not use quotation marks.
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)
If you are block-indenting four or more lines of poetry, and any of those lines take up more than
one line of your paper, carry the extra words to the next line of the paper and indent them an
additional one-quarter inch.
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 (. . .).
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 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).
To cite a poem from an anthology on your Works Cited page, use the same form as
for a short story:
Yeats, William Butler. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” Inside Literature. Ed. R.S. Gwynn and
Steven J. Zani. New York: Pearson Longman, 2007. 393. Print.Paper instructions
Paragraph Assignment 2 (Song Lyric/Poem Analysis)
Instructions
Using the information that you collected while annotating your chosen song or poem in Discussion 8, write a stand-alone literary analysis paragraph (approximately 200 - 250 words) in which you make and support a claim in regards to one of the following aspect of the lyrics: theme, symbolism, aural elements, or imagery.
Be sure to review Reading Poetry and MLA Style for Quoting Poems before you begin, and apply these conventions in your writing.
Additional Directions:
Identify the author, genre, and title of the short story in your topic sentence. (Always place song or poem titles in quotation marks).
Include the four components of analysis (assertions, textual evidence, explanations, and significance) in the paragraph.
Use the literary present tense as appropriate.
Upload your paragraph as a Microsoft Word document (or a PDF file if your computer doesn't support Word).
Use this heading format for essays (in top, left hand corner of page):
Name
Due date of assignment
ENGL 1102
Name of Writing Assignment (In this case, Paragraph 2)
The standard for typed paragraphs and essays in this course is as follows:
- Times New Roman font
- 12 point font size
- 1-inch margins (top, bottom, left, and right)
- double-spacing
Comments from Customer
It can be on any poem or song. That what the directions I attacked said.