The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms - Ross Murfin 2018

Canto

Canto: From the Italian for “song,” a section, often numbered, of a long poem.

EXAMPLES: Dante Alighieri’s Divina commedia (The Divine Comedy) (1321), Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), George Gordon, Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812—18), and Ezra Pound’s The Cantos (written 1915—62; originally published 1954) are divided into cantos.