post specific CSS

I am trying to put a ‘concrete poem’ in a post. It has a lot of white space. Every line is formatted differently. I’ve tried HTML tags & I’ve tried the spacer.gif approach, but I can’t get the format correct with any of this.

WordPress is insistent that using CSS is better, but how can I use CSS for only one specific post and a very specific format within that post? I’ve searched high and low for the answer to this and am coming up with nothing. Here’s some of the suggestions so far:

1. Make a new page template – yes, but it’s not an entire page, it’s only ONE POST that I want to reformat.
2. Use CSS ID – yes, but as each line of the poem is formatted differently, won’t I have to have separate IDs for each line – which, frankly, would be idiotic.

Ironic that old style typesetters would have no trouble whatsoever with this, even old style web design using only HTML wouldn’t have any trouble, but WordPress and CSS seems to find it impossible.

PLEASE please prove me wrong and tell me what I can do? I’m losing the will to live here.

Thanks in advance.