cantos

Cantos are the principal divisions of a long narrative poem or epic. The word canto comes from Italian canto, meaning "song" or "singing," and the term has been used since medieval times to organize extended verse into self-contained episodes. Cantos can vary in length, meter, and style, and they often advance the narrative, develop a theme, or juxtapose different voices and perspectives.

Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy is one of the most famous uses of the canto as a formal unit. The poem is divided into three cantiche (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso) and a total of 100 cantos, each contributing to the overall structure of the journey.

Other major examples include Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, divided into 46 cantos, and Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, which consists of 20 cantos. In modern literature, Ezra Pound's The Cantos is a monumental, unfinished epic composed in hundreds of cantos that weave history, language, and allusion.

The cantos tradition is not limited to Italian literature; the term has been applied to long poems in other languages as well, whenever the poet uses a recurring sectional unit. While the form is less rigid in contemporary poetry, cantos continue to function as units that organize large-scale poetic projects.