Do You Italicize Poem Titles?

By Staff WriterLast Updated March 29, 2020

Poem titles should be italicized. This rule applies to titles of poems that are situated within text. If the poem titles are at the top of a page or on the front cover of a report, they do not need to be italicized.

If italicization is not possible, poem titles can be put in quotation marks or underlined. Poem titles are italicized because they represent a full-length work. However, if someone is writing the title of a book of poetry followed by a list of poems from that book, the title of the book would be considered the full-length work, and it should be italicized. The individual poems are part of the larger work in this case, and as such, they should merely be put into quotation marks.