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Because HN doesn't preserve line-breaks and `>` doesn't do anything. You'd have to double-space the entire poem which is just silly.

HN should just preserve all line-breaks so we don't have to hack around it.

HN preserves linebreaks. It's the paragraph formatting that gets in the way of poetry like the above.

No it doesn't

(The above was written "No\nit\ndoesn't")

You may be referring to some sort of distinction here, but I'm just talking about newlines.

No, just a brainfart. I was thinking of something else. Sorry.

Or it could do what Markdown does and preserve line-breaks that end in double spaces.

Invisible markup doesn't look like a good idea.

It works just fine for Markdown, I don't see why it wouldn't work equally well here.