The canto () is a principal form of division in medieval and modern long poem.
Etymology and equivalent terms
The word
canto is derived from the
Italian language 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 English poetry, 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.[' fit | fytte, n.1.', Oxford English Dictionary Online, 1st ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1896).][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".
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 Ezra Pound's The Cantos (116 cantos), Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy (with 100 cantos
Citations
General references
