How do I cite a poem quoted in a journal article?

Note: This post relates to content in the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook. For up-to-date guidance, see the ninth edition of the MLA Handbook.

If in your essay you use a quotation from a poem that you found in a journal article, your in-text citation should include “qtd. in.” Your prose should also make clear who is being quoted, as explained in this post about quoting poems found in speeches. The following provides an example:

In his Immortality Ode, Wordsworth lamented the loss of “splendor in the grass,” a feeling linked to childhood (qtd. in Kantor 508).

Work Cited

Kantor, Jamison. “Immortality, Romanticism, and the Limit of the Liberal Imagination.” PMLA, vol. 133, no. 3, 2018, pp. 508–25.