Determine whether you have to comply with any citation style, such as that of the APA or MLA. An academic assignment for a college or high school class will usually require you to follow a particular style. If you are publishing an epigraph poem as part of a book, your editor may have guidelines you need to follow.
Treat the epigraph poem as you would any direct quotation, if you have to conform to APA citation style. As the Purdue University Online Writing Lab advises, you should first determine whether it is a short quotation or long quotation. If the epigraph poem has 40 words or more, it is considered a long quotation. For short epigraph poems, simply place the poet's last name, year of publication, and page number of the publication where you found the poem in parentheses after the quotation.
Format any epigraph poems longer than 40 words in the APA citation style using the following guidelines: begin the poem on a new line, indented as a new paragraph; double-space the lines in the poem; and after the final punctuation mark, include in parentheses the poet's last name, year of publication, and page number of the publication where you found the poem.
The MLA Handbook offers no specific instructions for formatting epigraph poems. Instead, use the MLA instructions for indented quotations when formatting epigraph poems in MLA style; it offers more flexibility than the APA style. Begin the epigraph poem one double-spaced line below the title, left- and right-indent the text from the margins and maintain single-spacing for the text.
Seek the advice of your editor or publisher when preparing a book manuscript for publication. Some publishers allow authors a vast amount of formatting flexibility and artistic license. Therefore, take the opportunity to consider font changes, text color changes, line spacing and whether an image or other visual design element would further enhance the epigraph poem. An example of one publisher's guidelines for epigraph poems is included in the Resources.