the.com/canto
A poem's chapter break, so epics feel less like a workout.
means A major division of a long poem, marking off one section of the story the way a chapter divides a novel.
from From Italian canto, meaning 'song,' which traces back to Latin cantus/canere, 'to sing.' It survives from the days when long narrative poems were sung or chanted aloud, often by troubadours or reciters working through an epic in sittings — each 'song' was a natural resting point. Dante's Divine Comedy helped cement the word's literary sense, dividing the whole journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise into numbered canti.
- origin
- from Italian, literally means song
- famous use
- Dante split the Divine Comedy into 100
- structure trick
- lets poets pace a story like prose
- byron favorite
- Don Juan sprawled across 17 cantos