Using and Citing Poetry in an Essay

• The ideas about any quoting of outside sources are still relevant with poetry. You still need to lead-in to your quotes, attaching them to your own ideas with a sentence. Never drop a quote! 

• Use the line number in your in-text ( ) citation, rather than page. The line of a poem never changes! 

• Don't quote more than three lines of poetry at a time, within a sentence. Your points will be harder to understand because there will be way too much language to unpack in those lines. Plus, quoting too much takes up your thought space. 

• With "If--" you are lucky that Kipling provides clear ideas with couplets, so you will like cite couplets.

• You don't have to, nor should you want to, always quote entire lines. With poems, you can practice quoting just important images or a figures of speech within a line or lines.

• Example:  The speaker's first piece of advice includes the idiom to "keep your head" (line 1). The idiom refers to the listeners need to stay calm and focused.

• Example: A major theme of the poem includes self control, as seen in the speaker's advice to the son to "trust yourself" (3), "don't give way to hating" (7), and do not "make dreams your master" (9). Such advice continues for the rest of the poem, including in the final stanza, where the speaker reminds his son not to let neither "foes nor loving friends" (27) emotionally change the way he acts. 

• Mechanically, if you are integrating two lines of poetry into your own sentence, you need to indicate the line break with a forward slash:   .../ ...

• Example:  "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock" beings with the command, "Let us go now, you and I, / When the clouds are spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherized upon a table," with that image setting the poem's sombre tone (lines 1-3).

• If the first word of each line is capitalized, make sure you do so in your own quote. Here, all three lines begin with words capitalized: Let, When, Like.  Your Kipling poem will do the same! 

• If you are quoting the last line of one stanza and the first line of the next stanza in the same quote, you use a double forward slash: ...// ...

• Example: Look at the poem "Those Winter Sundays." 

• The son shows the tense childhood relationship with his father, "and slowly I would rise and dress,/ fearing the chronic angers of that house,// Speaking indifferently to him" (lines 8-10).