How do I quote poetry, with newlines intact?

Question

A number of mythological sources are written in verse, and maintaining lines is usually ideal. You can get a new line by adding an extra line between each line of the quote, but this produces an awful lot of extra white space. Taking a random example from the Poetic Edda:

> Counsel me, Frigg, for I long to fare,

> And Vafthruthnir fain would find;

> fit wisdom old with the giant wise

> Myself would I seek to match.

Results in:

Counsel me, Frigg, for I long to fare,

And Vafthruthnir fain would find;

fit wisdom old with the giant wise

Myself would I seek to match.

Answer 1

Looked at some posts on English Language & Usage, and you can preserve a newline by adding two spaces at the end of the line:

> Counsel me, Frigg, for I long to fare,  
And Vafthruthnir fain would find;  
fit wisdom old with the giant wise  
Myself would I seek to match.

Which results in:

Counsel me, Frigg, for I long to fare,
And Vafthruthnir fain would find;
fit wisdom old with the giant wise
Myself would I seek to match.

Which seems much nicer. Sorry if this is common knowledge, but I've been annoyed by it more than once before, and it was news to me.

Answer 2

In addition to the double space at the end of a line to add a line break in the rendering, you can also use the html "non-breaking space" character   to add in the extra spaces for the lines that often have them.

This:

> Counsel me, Frigg, for I long to fare,  
      And Vafthruthnir fain would find;  
  fit wisdom old with the giant wise  
      Myself would I seek to match.

Becomes this:

Counsel me, Frigg, for I long to fare,
      And Vafthruthnir fain would find;
  fit wisdom old with the giant wise
      Myself would I seek to match.

It's very hard to read it in the markdown code, but it does make the poetry very pretty.