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What's the best way to format poetry, where preserving line breaks is important, but extra white space is not desired between lines?

I encountered the situation for this question and was not impressed with the look of formatting that resulted from my use of a blockquote, i.e., like this:

As dry leaves before the wild hurricane fly,

When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;

So up to the house-top the coursers they flew,

With the sleigh full of toys — and St. Nicholas too:

1 Answer 1

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Put two spaces at the end of each line in the blockquote, and don't put a blank line between lines of text. The result looks like this:

As dry leaves before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;
So up to the house-top the coursers they flew,
With the sleigh full of toys — and St. Nicholas too:

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  • Thank you. That's helpful for me, too. I wish there were some way to use numbered items with intervening paragraphs without getting everything renumbered to 1.
    – John Lawler
    Commented Dec 14, 2012 at 17:42
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    @John Put a space in front of the intervening paragraphs. That associates the paragraph with the previous numbered items so that subsequent numbered items continue the numbering.
    – Edward Brey
    Commented Dec 15, 2012 at 15:30

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