How to Cite a Poem in MLA & APA: Line Numbers, Quotes & Examples

By MLA Generator Editorial Team · Updated July 7, 2026

A poem is two citation problems in one. The works-cited entry is the easy half — a poem is a small work inside a container, like a chapter in a book. The hard half is everything around the quotation: whether the number in your parenthetical citation is a page, a line, or nothing at all; where the slashes go; when three lines become a block quote. MLA has published precise official answers to all of it, several of which contradict what the big citation sites say; APA has no poem page at all, which is why so many APA “rules” for verse online are invented. This guide sticks to what the MLA Style Center and APA Style actually publish.

The shortest answer: in MLA, cite the poet, the poem title in quotation marks, then the italicized collection, anthology, or website it appears in, with publisher, year, and page or URL. Quote up to three lines run into your sentence with a spaced slash ( / ) at each line break; in-text, cite line numbers only if the source prints them — “had learn’d, in cells of secret gloom, / How sunshine is forgotten!” (Hemans, lines 131-32).

What counts as a poem

This page covers the individual poem: a short work found in a poet’s own collection, in an anthology or textbook, or on a website such as Poetry Foundation. A sonnet, a lyric, an ode, an excerpt from a longer cycle — same format. A few near neighbors are cited differently:

• A book-length poem — Paradise Lost, The Odyssey — is a book: title in italics, no container. Use the book format.
• Song lyrics are a song, even when they read like poetry.
• A poem posted on Instagram is cited as an Instagram post, not a poem — details under edge cases below.
• A poem quoted inside someone else’s article or biography is an indirect source. Find the original if you can; if you cannot, MLA’s “qtd. in” mechanism handles it.

If it is one titled (or numbered) poem inside something larger, this page applies.

Information to collect before you cite

Everything comes off the page the poem is printed on, plus the book’s title page or the website’s masthead:

• The poet’s name — as printed with the poem.
• The poem’s title — in quotation marks in MLA. Two exceptions: a generic numbered title like Sonnet 30 is styled roman with no quotation marks, and an untitled poem goes by its first line, reproduced exactly.
• The container — the collection (Fox: Poems 1998–2000), the anthology, or the website (Poetry Foundation). Italicized in MLA — and in most styles when it is a book or anthology; note that APA leaves a website name in roman type and italicizes the poem title instead, and Vancouver italicizes nothing.
• Editors or translators — anthologies almost always have them.
• Publisher and year — for an old poem on a new site, note both the original publication year and any date the page shows.
• Page or page range — print only — or the URL of the poem’s own page.
• Whether line numbers are printed in the margin — this single fact decides your MLA in-text citations. Do not count lines yourself; if the source prints no line numbers, you fall back on page numbers in print — and on no number at all online.
• Access date — MLA wants one when the page is undated; Harvard, Vancouver, AMA, and IEEE want one for anything online; APA and Chicago generally do not.

The generator at / pulls the poet, title, site name, and URL from a pasted poem page and formats the rest. Check the original publication year by hand — poem pages often bury it in a credit line at the bottom.

One poem, formatted in all seven styles

The example is Derek Mahon’s “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford,” first published in 1975 and read on Poetry Foundation — the setup behind most real poem citations today: a decades-old poem on an undated webpage with no line numbers.

The source: “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford” by Derek Mahon, first published in 1975, read on Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/92154/a-disused-shed-in-co-wexford. The page prints no line numbers and no publication date. Accessed July 5, 2026.

Two things separate the styles. The first is what the year attaches to. MLA hangs the original publication year directly on the poem — “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford.” 1975. — and closes with an access date because the webpage is undated. APA folds the same year into its author-date slot, (1975). The second is the quotation marks. MLA quotes the poem title because it is a small work inside a container; APA never puts quotation marks on reference-list titles, italicizes the poem because a standalone webpage is the “book” of its world, and drops the title to sentence case. The numeric styles treat the whole thing as an ordinary webpage.

In-text, for the same poem — because this page prints no line numbers, MLA’s official rule says the parenthetical citation contains no number at all:

• MLA: (Mahon) — or nothing, if your prose already names him, since there is no number to add
• APA: (Mahon, 1975) or narrative Mahon (1975)
• Chicago: author-date (Mahon 1975); a notes-style paper instead uses a numbered footnote in Chicago’s notes-bibliography format, which is formatted differently from the author-date entry in the table
• Harvard: (Mahon, 1975)
• Vancouver: (1) or [1]
• AMA: superscript ¹
• IEEE: [1]

How to cite a poem in MLA

The MLA 9 works-cited entry depends on where you read the poem. Three templates cover nearly every case.

In the poet’s own collection:

Rich, Adrienne. “Fox.” Fox: Poems 1998–2000, W. W. Norton, 2001, p. 25.

In an anthology or textbook:

Heaney, Seamus. “Funeral Rites.” The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry, edited by Peter Fallon and Derek Mahon, Penguin Books, 1990, pp. 149–51.

On a website, with the original publication year after the title and an access date if the page is undated:

Mahon, Derek. “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford.” 1975. Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/92154/a-disused-shed-in-co-wexford. Accessed 5 July 2026.

One official variant most guides get wrong: a generic numbered title — Sonnet 30, Canto 1 — is styled roman, with no quotation marks. The MLA Style Center’s own works-cited example, from a September 2025 post:

Shakespeare, William. Sonnet 30. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, M. H. Abrams, general editor, 6th ed., vol. 1, W. W. Norton, 1993, p. 812.

And for an excerpt from a poem cycle, the same post models:

Spenser, Edmund. Excerpt from Amoretti. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, M. H. Abrams, general editor, 6th ed., vol. 1, W. W. Norton, 1993, pp. 734–38.

The in-text citation follows MLA’s official number rule:

• Short poem — no longer than a page, or its online equivalent — cite no number at all. The reader can find two quoted lines on one page without help.
• Longer poem printed with line or part numbers — cite those numbers, not page numbers. The first citation carries the label: (lines 119–20) or (line 57). Every later citation drops it: (127–28). If your prose has not named the poet, the name joins the parenthetical, separated from the label by a comma — MLA’s official example, punctuation-exact: “had learn’d, in cells of secret gloom, / How sunshine is forgotten!” (Hemans, lines 131-32).
• Longer poem in print with no line or part numbers — cite page numbers, exactly as you would for prose. The MLA Style Center: cite page numbers “as you would for a work in prose” when the poem is in print but unnumbered.
• No printed numbers of any kind — no lines, no parts, no pages, as on most webpages — cite no number, full stop. The MLA Handbook is explicit: “Do not count unnumbered paragraphs or other parts.” An online poem with no line numbers gets (Mahon) at most, never a line count you did yourself.

Quoting the verse is graded by length:

• Up to three lines run into your sentence, with a spaced slash marking each line break: “Even now there are places where a thought might grow — / Peruvian mines, worked out and abandoned”. A stanza break inside a run-in quote takes a double slash ( // ).
• More than three lines becomes a block quotation: indented half an inch from the left margin, double-spaced, no quotation marks, with the poem’s original line breaks and any unusual spacing reproduced exactly.
• Omitting material: use ellipses for omitted words and keep the slash showing where lines end; a wholly omitted line in a run-in quote is replaced by an ellipsis set between slashes — “my mask is powerful / … / the sea is not a question of power” is the MLA Style Center’s own example (the double slash is reserved for a stanza break, not an omission). In a block quotation, show a whole missing line as a full line of spaced periods.

How to cite a poem in APA

APA 7 has no poem-specific reference format; you pick the pattern that matches where the poem lives.

In an anthology, use the chapter-in-an-edited-book format (Publication Manual, 7th ed., Section 10.3):

Author, A. A. (Year). Title of poem. In E. E. Editor (Ed.), Title of anthology (pp. xx–xx). Publisher.

A classic poem reprinted in a modern anthology adds a reprint statement at the end — (Reprinted from Original Title, pp. xx–xx, by E. Editor, Ed., Year, Publisher) — and the in-text citation carries both years, earlier first: (Bronfenbrenner, 1973/2005). The dual date is how APA signals you read a 19th-century poem in a 21st-century book.

On a website, use the webpage format, with the poem title in italics and sentence case:

Mahon, D. (1975). A disused shed in Co. Wexford. Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/92154/a-disused-shed-in-co-wexford

No “Retrieved from,” and no retrieval date unless the page is designed to change.

In-text, APA is strict where MLA is flexible: every citation carries the author and year. For the numbers, APA’s guidance on material without page numbers (Section 8.28) says that for works with canonically numbered sections — religious or classical works — you “use the name of the book, chapter, verse, line, and/or canto instead of a page number.” APA’s only official verse example, punctuation-exact:

In Much Ado About Nothing, Don John said, “In the meantime / let me be that I am and seek not to alter me” (Shakespeare, 1623/1995, 1.3.36–37).

That is act 1, scene 3, lines 36–37, with the dual date marking original and republished versions — and the line break marked with a slash, just as in MLA. For an unnumbered poem on a webpage, the same section offers alternatives: a heading or section name, a paragraph number, or both, as in (Chamberlin, 2014, para. 1).

Block quotations in APA follow the prose rule: 40 or more words (Section 8.27), indented half an inch, no quotation marks. APA publishes no verse-specific line threshold — a two-line rule you may see on other sites does not exist in the manual.

Edge cases

You wrapped Sonnet 30 in quotation marks. Almost every citation site does, and the MLA Style Center’s September 2025 post on numbered anthology poems says not to: a generic numbered title goes in the Title of Source element in roman type, no quotation marks. Guides written before late 2025 will not have this ruling.

Your APA citation reads (Poe, lines 3-4). That violates author-date: an APA citation without a year is broken no matter what follows it. Write (Poe, 1845/1993, lines 3-4) if the edition numbers its lines, or fall back on Section 8.28’s paragraph-or-heading alternatives if it does not. Several citation-generator sites print the yearless form; the Publication Manual never does.

The poem is untitled or known by its first line. Use the first line as the title, reproduced exactly as the source prints it — capitalization, punctuation, and all. Emily Dickinson’s poems are the classic case: cite the first line as your edition gives it, not a tidied version.

The line numbering restarts in every section. Long poems in numbered parts — cantos, books, fits — restart their line counts, so a bare line number is ambiguous. Cite the section and the line together, the same logic as APA’s 1.3.36–37. MLA’s rule to cite “line numbers and other part numbers” covers exactly this.

You cite the same poem all through the paper. The label appears once: (lines 119–20) on first citation, then bare numbers — (127–28) — every time after. MLA’s stated goal is “to be concise and to cite what is most useful to the reader.”

You found the poem quoted inside a journal article. Track down the original — poem texts vary between editions, and you want the poet, not the critic’s transcription. If the original is genuinely unavailable, cite it as an indirect source with “qtd. in” in MLA or “as cited in” in APA.

The poem was posted on Instagram. Rupi Kaur’s work, most “instapoetry” — cite the post, not an imaginary print poem: the handle as author, the post text as title, Instagram as container, then date and URL. The Instagram guide has the full pattern.

You need Chicago. The Chicago Manual of Style, 18th edition (September 2024), covers quoting poetry in chapter 12 — renumbered from sections 13.25–13.29 of the 17th, so older university handouts cite the old numbers. Chicago’s block threshold is lower than MLA’s: two or more lines of verse are normally set off as a block; a run-in quote uses a spaced slash for line breaks and a double slash for stanza breaks. When a note mixes page and line numbers, Chicago wants the p./pp. label: p. 25, lines 12–14. An anthology poem takes the chapter-in-a-book format; the table above shows the author-date reference form our engine produces.

You need AMA, IEEE, or Harvard. AMA 11 and IEEE publish no poem-specific rule — cite the poem as a book chapter or webpage under their general formats, as the table rows do, rather than inventing verse rules those styles never wrote. Harvard has no single governing body; the Cite Them Right pattern in the table is the safe default unless your department publishes its own variant.

The principle underneath all of it: the works-cited entry places the poem inside whatever container you actually read it in, and the in-text citation gives the reader only numbers the source itself prints — line numbers if they exist, page numbers for a long poem in print without them, nothing when the source prints no numbers at all. Count nothing yourself, mark every line break you run in, and the rest is ordinary citation.

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