Expanded Reference Guide

3.2. When quoting verse...

Short verse quotations (three lines or less) should indicate the original text’s line breaks by inserting an upright stroke with a space on each side ' / ' to separate lines, preserving initial capital letters if used.

1. It is implied in the lines ‘“Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!” / Quoth the raven, “Nevermore”’ that Poe’s narrator cannot escape his pain of lost love, which will haunt him forever.¹

2. While the narrator in ‘Tulips’ wants to efface herself, she is forced to accept an identity – an ‘I’ – as the word play on ‘eye’ in the second stanza makes clear: ‘They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff / Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut / Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in’.²

Note:

• Follow the same rules on punctuation and quotations within quotations as for short prose quotations.

Long verse quotations of more than three lines, even if less than forty words, should be indented and single-spaced, as for long prose quotations. The line breaks of the original text should be preserved.

1. In book thirteen of the 1805 Prelude Wordsworth suggests that a version of Nature’s sublime power can also be found within creative minds; nature’s sublime

is the express

Resemblance – in the fullness of its strength
Made visible – a genuine counterpart
And brother of the glorious faculty
Which higher minds bear with them as their own.³

2. John Donne diminishes the importance of the sun – and other natural forces – in comparison with man when he jokes

Thy beams so reverend and strong
[...]
I could eclipse them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long.⁴

3.

Poems

written in the ((((1950's by

charles
olsen
have/lots of stuff

like        this

going on

on
on

it’s to do with breath and (other stuff that he writes about in

THE HUMAN uniVERSE)⁵

4. Some poems incorporate or create images, such as this example of concrete poetry  by Bob Cobbing:⁶

Note:

• If you are starting in the middle of a line, leave a space and abide by the original capitalisation, as in example one.
• If you are missing out one or more entire lines, use a single ellipsis in square brackets to stand for that line, as in example two.
• If an original line is too long to fit onto one line, carry on to the next line but indent it five more spaces to make clear that it is part of the preceding line.
• Quotations of verse with irregular or unusual line spacing: as far as possible, you should try and reproduce the presentation of the verse as it appears on the page of your edition, as in example three. If this proves difficult, you could scan the text, or find it on google images, and include as an image, as in example four.