Q. Good morning! I have a question about CMOS 8.183 (18th ed.). It says that a very long poetic work is usually italicized but that shorter poems are set in roman and enclosed in quotation marks. What is the cutoff point that distinguishes a longish short poem from a truly long poem? At what point do you stop putting poems in quotation marks and start putting them in italics? Thank you for your wonderful Q&A section!
Q. Could you clarify which texts—specifically sacred and ancient ones—should be written in roman type rather than italics? Is there a cutoff date for something to be considered “ancient”? Does it matter if an ancient text is sacred, literary, or philosophical? Is there some authority that rules whether a text is considered sacred? For example, some consider the Analects as sacred, but that title is widely italicized. Please advise.
A. Some of the advice in CMOS is there mainly to acknowledge how the rest of the world does things rather than to set a rule. Paragraphs 8.183 and (for the second question) 8.104 are in this category. Together, they amount to something like this: Note: Some titles may be treated differently from what we advise elsewhere. Here are a few examples.
This advice is supposed to warn people that one doesn’t generally refer, for example, to The Bible or Dante’s “Inferno” or Shakespeare’s Sonnets—stylings that might seem right based on the advice elsewhere in CMOS. Instead, that would be the Bible and Dante’s Inferno and Shakespeare’s Sonnets—not because we say so but because that’s the convention. And there’s no magic cutoff point. If the Analects of Confucius are normally italicized in your readings, then use italics.
The same thing goes for poems. Is it “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” or The Rime of the Ancient Mariner? That one could go either way, but if you’re an editor, you know what to do: Choose the form that makes the most sense to you and be consistent about it.