The canto () is a principal form of division in medieval and modern long poetry.

Etymology and equivalent terms

The word ''canto'' is derived from the Italian word for "song" or "singing", which comes from the Latin ''cantus'', "song", from the infinitive verb ''canere'', "to sing"."Canto"
''The Merriam-Webster Dictionary''. Retrieved 27 September 2015. In

Old Saxon poetry Old Saxon, also known as Old Low German, was a Germanic language and the earliest recorded form of Low German (spoken nowadays in Northern Germany, the northeastern Netherlands, southern Denmark, the Americas and parts of Eastern Europe). It i ...

Old English poetry Old English literature refers to poetry and prose written in Old English in early medieval England, from the 7th century to the decades after the Norman Conquest of 1066, a period often termed Anglo-Saxon England. The 7th-century work ''Cædmon ...

, and Middle English poetry, the term '' fitt'' was sometimes used to denote a section of a long narrative poem, and that term is sometimes used in modern scholarship of this material instead of ''canto''.R. D. Fulk, "The Origin of the Numbered Sections in ''Beowulf'' and in Other Old English Poems", ''Anglo-Saxon England'', 35 (2006), 91–109 (p. 91 fn. 1). .

Form and use

The use of the canto was described in the 1911 edition of the '' Encyclopædia Britannica'' as "a convenient division when poetry was more usually sung by the minstrel to his own accompaniment than read". There is no specific format, construction or style for a canto and it is not limited to any one type of poetry. The typical length of a canto varies greatly from one poem to another. The average canto in the ''Divine Comedy'' is 142 lines long, while the average canto in ''Os Lusíadas'' is 882 lines long.

Examples

Some famous poems that employ the canto division are Dante's '' Divine Comedy'' (with 100 cantos), Camões' '' Os Lusíadas'' (10 cantos), Torquato Tasso's ''

Gerusalemme liberata ''Jerusalem Delivered'', also known as ''The Liberation of Jerusalem'' ( it, La Gerusalemme liberata ; ), is an epic poem by the Italian poet Torquato Tasso, first published in 1581, that tells a largely mythified version of the First Crusade i ...

'' (20 cantos), Byron's '' Don Juan'' (17 cantos, the last of which is unfinished) and

Ezra Pound Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a Fascism, fascist collaborator in Italy during World War II. His works ...

's ''

The Cantos ''The Cantos'' by Ezra Pound is a long, incomplete poem in 120 sections, each of which is a ''canto''. Most of it was written between 1915 and 1962, although much of the early work was abandoned and the early cantos, as finally published, date ...

'' (116 cantos).

Citations

General references

* {{Refend Italian words and phrases Poetic forms