Keep lines of poem from breaking

@posterns I have a lot of experience with formatting text in Word for InDesign text mapping and @Abambo is totally right that this is not a push button solution. The best practice is to strip all formatting out of the Word document, then apply simple styles such as Normal and Headings (which I always modify or create a new style based on those) making sure invisible characters is turned on. I then use find/replace to get rid of a lot of bad characters, extra spaces and paragraph returns,  convert quotation marks and dashes, etc. especially when converting from PDF to Word because a lot of artifacts can import. Sometimes I also copy the text to a .txt document and then place it back in a new Word document with regular margins. The problem with this is it can lose some of the italics and bold formatting. I also try selecting all text in Word and do a special copy to another new Word document. Lots of little things on this end make your life much easier once you get to InDesign! Meanwhile, if you can't go backwards, then you will need to reapply paragraph styles and override any formatting that came in. Make sure you have invisible characters on as well which will help you identify where things are holding up text flow. I hope this is helpful!

Converting a PDF to Word is not a push button solution as you may think. I would first curate the data in Word. The easyest way is to get ridd of all formatting by copy/pasting the data to notepad++ or similar (any text only editor should be good) and than copy/paste it into Indesign. You can then assign the propper formatting in Indesign without the legacy formatting.