How to Cite a Poem

Poetry is mostly cited in MLA, because it is mostly written about in literature courses. MLA has the most detailed rules for quoting verse, and this guide starts there. The other styles follow, since poems also turn up in history, psychology and education papers.

What to Collect

• Poet and poem title
• Where you read it: a website, an anthology (with editors), or the poet's collection
• Publisher and year of that book, or the site name and URL
• Page range of the poem in the book
• Whether the edition prints line numbers
• The year the poem was first published, if it is old

The worked example is Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken", first published in 1916 in Mountain Interval and available on the Poetry Foundation's website. It is 20 lines long and in the public domain.

Quick Reference by Major Style

MLA (9th Edition)

Poem on a website:

Poem in an anthology:

Poem in the poet's own collection:

In-text, first citation: (Frost, lines 18-20). Later citations: (Frost 18-20), or just (18-20) when the poet is clear from your sentence.

These line references assume an edition that prints line numbers, such as a teaching anthology. The Poetry Foundation page and the Holt edition of Mountain Interval print none. For those, MLA says not to count the lines yourself: give no number for the web page, and the page number for the book, (Frost 9).

The word "lines" appears once, to establish that the numbers are lines and not pages. Write the word out; the abbreviations "l." and "ll." are easily misread as numerals.

APA (7th Edition)

Cite the container. For a web page:

For an anthology, use the chapter in an edited book format and add the original year:

In-text: (Frost, n.d.) for the web page, or (Frost, 1916/2018, p. xx) for a republished poem. Where the edition gives line numbers, APA accepts them: (Frost, 1916/2018, lines 18–20).

Chicago (18th Edition)

Footnote:

Bibliography:

For poems with numbered lines, stanzas, books or cantos, Chicago allows those numbers in place of pages, because they are the same in every edition: "lines 18–20", or for a long poem, "bk. 1, lines 254–55".

Harvard (Cite Them Right)

Poem in an anthology, following the chapter pattern:

Poem on a website:

In-text: (Frost, no date), or with line numbers for a quotation: (Frost, no date, lines 18–20).

IEEE

Poems are rarely cited in IEEE style and the IEEE Reference Guide has no format for them. Use the book-chapter form for a printed poem, or the website form for one read online:

In-text: [1, lines 18–20]

How to Quote Poetry (MLA)

One line, or part of a line. Put it in quotation marks inside your sentence.

Two or three lines. Run them into your sentence and mark each line break with a slash, with a space before and after. Keep the poet's capitalization and punctuation.

A stanza break inside a short quotation is marked with a double slash ( // ).

Four or more lines. Set the quotation off as a block. Start on a new line, indent the whole quotation half an inch from the left margin, reproduce the line breaks and any unusual spacing as printed, and leave out quotation marks. The parenthetical citation follows the final punctuation of the last line.

Omissions. Use an ellipsis for words left out within a line. To omit one or more full lines from a block quotation, MLA uses a line of spaced periods about the length of a full line of the poem.

Chicago follows the same practice. It sets off two or more lines of verse as a block in most cases and uses the slash for run-in quotations. APA has no verse-specific rules: quotations of fewer than 40 words run in with slashes, and 40 words or more form a block.

Other Edge Cases

Book-length poems. Italicize the title and cite by the poem's own divisions. MLA: (Paradise Lost 1.254-55) means book 1, lines 254 to 255. Chicago: Paradise Lost, bk. 1, lines 254–55.

Translated poems. Credit the translator after the title: translated by First Last (MLA), (F. Last, Trans.) (APA). You are quoting the translator's words, so the translation you used matters.

Untitled poems. Use the first line as the title, in quotation marks, with the capitalization as printed. Emily Dickinson's poems are usually cited this way, often with the number from the Franklin or Johnson edition.

Poems heard at a reading or seen in a video. Cite the recording or the event. See how to cite online videos.

Poems on social media. Cite the post. See how to cite social media.

Song lyrics. Lyrics are quoted with slashes like verse, and cited to the recording or the published score.

Copyright

Quoting a few lines for criticism in coursework is ordinarily fine. Poems are short, though, and quoting one in full can amount to reproducing the whole work. In the UK, copyright in a written work lasts for 70 years after the author's death (gov.uk). In the United States, works published before 1931 are in the public domain as of 2026 (Cornell University Library's copyright term chart). If your work will be published or posted openly, quote only what your analysis needs, or seek permission.

Common Mistakes

• Italicizing the title of a short poem, or putting a book-length poem in quotation marks
• Counting lines by hand when the edition does not number them
• Abbreviating "line" to "l." or "ll.", which readers can mistake for numerals
• Leaving out the spaces around the slash, or losing the poet's capital letters at line starts
• Putting quotation marks around a block quotation
• Citing only the anthology's editors and leaving out the poet
• Copying the text from a lyrics or quotes site whose version has errors

Sources for These Formats

• MLA Handbook, 9th ed., sections on quoting poetry and on citing works in containers; MLA Style Center, "How should I style my parenthetical citation the first time I quote lines from a poem if I have not mentioned the author's name in my prose?" and "How do I cite an online poem with no line numbers?" (style.mla.org)
• Robert Frost, Mountain Interval (Henry Holt, 1916). The contents page ("THE ROAD NOT TAKEN ... 9") and the text of the poem were checked in the Project Gutenberg transcription (gutenberg.org/ebooks/29345), which reproduces a May 1931 Henry Holt printing, not the 1916 first printing
• APA Style, "Quotations" and "Chapter in an Edited Book/Ebook References" (apastyle.apa.org)
• The Chicago Manual of Style, 18th ed., on quoting poetry and on citing classic works by line (chicagomanualofstyle.org)
• Pears and Shields, Cite Them Right, Harvard section on chapters and anthologies
• IEEE Reference Guide, version 3.28.2025 (no poetry format)

Full style rules: MLA, APA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE.