[ElMiko]

I'm sorry if it's going to sound like i'm repeating myself, but I genuinely don't know how else to describe it:

as in the picture above (EDIT: and below), I want the stanzas of a poem in a blockquote to be left-aligned WITHIN the blockquote. But i want the blockquote to be center-aligned relative to the page. What you're seeing in the image above is what Sigil PageEdit (and similarly Sigil's Preview window) displays. HOWEVER, the way Sigil/PageEdit previews epub is not how they are actually rendered in most readers. So, for example if you try to view my original file in the ReadiumReader plugin, you will see both instances of the "errors/undesired formatting" that I described in the first post.

As a corollary to this, I want the width of the blockquote to be defined by the text it contains so that if i right-align two lines of text (broken by a <br /> tag) the rightmost boundary will be defined by the longest line in the blockquote, not the rightmost bounds of the page itself.