how do you format a poem in an essay
Short poem titles use in quotation marks, as for the long poem titles, as you have noticed, they are written in italics.
Important Rules for Citing Poems in a Right Way
If you quote two or three lines, use a forward slash to mark the line breaks. Put a space before and after the slash. Make sure to use the same punctuation, capitalization and styling as in the original text.
Mahon’s poem opens with a series of images of eerily deserted spaces:
- Read the poem aloud at least twice before you start analyzing it. The sounds are important when you need to appreciate the work of art; write down your first impressions.
- Start with the understanding of all individual words. Find a good dictionary & look up for the meanings of all the words which are not familiar to you. Use the internet to find information about places & people mentioned in the text.
- Determine the theme. It is the idea that the poet wants to express. You have to look at the work you are analyzing as a whole & try to discover the ways the various sections of it interact.
- Look at the title. Determine why it was chosen and what information it provides you with.
- Think about the tone. Determine the speaker and his/her mood.
- Look at the structure to understand how the poem is organized and how the stanzas or sections related to each other.
- Consider the rhythm & sound. Determine the meter & the rhyme scheme and think how they affect the meaning of the whole literary work.
- Analyze the language & the imagery. Determine the visual & emotional effects the words create. Find symbols and figures of speech & take time to feel the mood.
- Think how the poetic work relates to the historical context.
- Consider the poem as a whole. Synthesize the separate parts of your analysis to present the main idea you will discuss in your paper. Express your thoughts about what the author is trying to say in this piece of poetry.
Wondering how to write an impressive poetry analysis essay? Writing an academic paper about poetry can be one of the most challenging tasks for high school & college students who take a literary class, have no experience in analyzing different poetic works & have no idea where to start.
This article has been viewed 1,189,122 times.
u00a9 2020 wikiHow, Inc. All rights reserved. wikiHow, Inc. is the copyright holder of this image under U.S. and international copyright laws. This image is not licensed under the Creative Commons license applied to text content and some other images posted to the wikiHow website. This image may not be used by other entities without the express written consent of wikiHow, Inc.
n
To insert a poem segment composed of three lines or fewer into an essay, write an introductory statement that places the lines in context of the thesis, followed by a colon. Place the excerpt in the body of the essay. Use forward slashes to separate each line. Place numbers in parentheses at the end to cite the particular lines. For example, a short excerpt from Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee” would appear as: “And bore her away from me/ To shut her up in a sepulchre/ In this kingdom by the sea” (18-20).
In the body of an essay, ellipses indicate that a segment of a sentence is missing. This rule also applies to poetry excerpts. However, when you remove a section of text from the beginning of a poetry line, replace the missing section with a lengthy indention, rather than ellipses. If the missing words are in the center or end of the line, ellipses are necessary. When an entire line is omitted within the poetry passage, a line of ellipses replaces the missing line. These rules are illustrated in the following passage from Sharon Olds’s “Still Life in Landscape”:
Refences:
http://www.scribbr.com/mla/poem-citation/
http://eduessayhelper.org/blog/poetry-analysis-essay
http://www.wikihow.com/Quote-and-Cite-a-Poem-in-an-Essay-Using-MLA-Format
http://penandthepad.com/insert-poem-essay-12212927.html
http://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/example-essay-structure/