Formatting poetry - How to use paragraph styles with returns

I'll be using InDesign to format a very long narrative poem written in Word. In the Word doc, a hard carriage return (i.e. an Enter keystroke) has been used to separate the poem into lines, and paragraph breaks are represented by a tab at the beginning of a line. If I'm right, a hard return indicates to InDesign that a new paragraph has been started, but I want a paragraph to consist of multiple lines with carriage returns.

One solution may be to tell InDesign to recognize a new paragraph only after two hard returns. There aren't many paragraphs, so it would be easy to replace the tabs with double hard returns in the Word doc. Is this possible?

Another solution may be to replace all hard carriage returns with soft returns (Shift + Enter), and all tabs with hard returns. If I understand correctly, this will tell InDesign that paragraphs end only where I want them to. The poem is many thousands of lines long, so this will require a lot of replacing, which I'm trying to avoid if possible.

What's the best solution here? If it's the latter, what's the simplest way to replace all hard returns with soft?