For some "hints" about the problems of poetry in (x)html, particularly as it relates to small machines, see: http://epubsecrets.com/formatting-poetry-in-epub-part-1.php http://www.pigsgourdsandwikis.com/2012/01/media-queries-for-formatting-poetr y-on.html http://ebookarchitects.com/blog/backwards-compatible-poetry-for-kf8mobi/ In general I would say most people at PG/DP are going to be pretty unhappy if you mark each line of your poems with a "<p>" because the consensus is pretty much we really really want <p> to mean a paragraph. In general the "poetry problem" consists of the following problems: * you would like a relatively clean, simple, readable, maintainable markup scheme. * that scheme should "correctly" label parts of poetry to the extent that it marks them up at all. * you would like not to have to put in extra "hacky" bits. * you would like the poetry to do an appropriate poetry wrap-indent on small machines. * you would like lines that are indented in the original (which are not simply wrap line in the original) to be indented like the original. * you would like a font that is indicative of poetry and not a hack monospace font for example. * you would like it to work with the limitations of epub * you would like it to work with the limitations of kf8 And *you would like it to work with the limitations of mobi I haven't seen a "poetry scheme" yet that meets all these criteria. The ones that come close use negative margins, but I have seen negative margins fail spectacular on epub machines that support margin trimming. What I have done personally so far is just punt and not bother to do the poetry wrap-indent, in which case say a blockquote with explicit <br> on line ends and some is "sufficient." If you want to do poetry wrap-indents and are willing to break badly on epub machines with margin trimming turned on then the common PG/DP approach which I think is being generated by guiguts is not bad: ======= <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" /> <title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Limericks</title> <style type="text/css"> .poem {margin-left:10%; margin-right:10%; text-align: left;} .poem br {display: none;} .poem .stanza {margin: 1em 0em 1em 0em;} .poem span.i0 {display: block; margin-left: 0em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;} .poem span.i2 {display: block; margin-left: 1em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;} .poem span.i4 {display: block; margin-left: 2em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;} </style> </head> <body> <div class="poem"> <div class="stanza"> <span class="i0">There was a young man of St. Kitts,<br /></span> <span class="i0">Who was very much troubled with fits;<br /></span> <span class="i2"> The eclipse of the moon<br /></span> <span class="i2"> Threw him into a swoon;<br /></span> <span class="i0">Where he tumbed and broke into bits.<br /></span> </div> </div> </body> </html> ====== Note to imply that I agree with the particular margin settings being used! Note unfortunately the kindles require the gratuitous <br /> Where I have put a copy of this up at http://freekindlebooks.org/Dev/poem.html and http://freekindlebooks.org/Dev/poem.mobi (kf8 + mobi7) Scrunch an html browser to a very narrow window, or set a Kindle to a very large font to force a "poetry wrap-indent" This code "works" on IE, ADE epub, and Kindle Fire (KF8) and "works but somewhat degraded" on Firefox and Kindle mobi7 versions. But again may break spectacular on epub devices with margin trimming set.