A section or chapter of a long poem, similar to how a book has chapters.
From Italian and Spanish 'canto,' derived from Latin 'cantus' (song). The term originally meant a song and came to describe the major divisions of epic poems like Dante's Divine Comedy.
Dante's Inferno has 34 cantos, and medieval readers would memorize individual cantos like modern people memorize movie scenes. The word reminds us that long poems were meant to be recited aloud—they're fundamentally musical, which is why the structure follows song-like divisions.
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