Imagine what it would be like to read a novel without any chapters or paragraphs. It would be extremely exhausting and confusing to read such a long continuous body of text and understand its meaning. Similarly, even poems need to be broken up into shorter pieces, especially longer ones. One such example of an element used to divide poetry is a stanza. A canto is something very similar to a stanza. But how are the two different? Let us look at the meaning and examples of a canto to find out.
Canto meaning
A canto is a subdivision or subsection of long works of poetry, such as epic poems or other narrative poems. Therefore, it is not exactly a form of poetry but rather an element or unit of poetry.
Epic poem: Long narrative poems chronicling the adventures and deeds of extraordinary heroic characters.
A canto has no specific format or writing style and can include any type of rhyme scheme or meter. Generally, most cantos tend to be longer than five lines.
The word 'canto' is an Italian term that was derived from the Latin word 'cantus', which means 'to sing'.
This name came about because cantos were first used by minstrels who narrated lengthy heroic poems to the nobility with the accompaniment of musical instruments. These poems were broken down into smaller cantos for convenience, as it helped the singers memorise the work easier and also served as natural pauses for the musicians and listeners.
Fig. 1 - A painting depicting the minstrels of Italy by Gustavo Simoni, a 19th-century Italian painter.
Canto poetry
So why are cantos used in poetry?
Since cantos are primarily used for narrative poems, they break the plot of a poem into several plot points or sub-plots. Therefore, each canto should ideally have its own beginning, middle and end. That way, individual cantos can either aid the reader's understanding of the poem as a whole or exist as a standalone piece with its own storyline and theme.
This format makes longer poems more digestible for the reader, who can choose to enjoy individual subsections of a long poem instead of trying to wrap their mind around an unbroken body of text with never-ending rhymes and meters.
The break at the end of each canto gives the reader a chance to stop, reflect and appreciate everything they have just read.
Dante's Divine Comedy (1320) consists of 14,233 lines in total. Imagine reading that as a continuously rolling body of text! Well, Dante Alighieri makes use of cantos to help break up what could have been an extremely tedious and dense read. First, he divided the poem into three chapters - Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso - detailing Dante's journey in every stage of the afterlife. Each chapter is further broken down into 33 cantos and one additional introductory canto. This makes the poem more bite-sized and easy on the eyes.
Fig. 2 - Illustration of Dante's Divine Comedy (1320) by William Blake
Stanza: A division of poetry that breaks a poem into separate units of two or more lines each.
Explanations 
Exams 
Magazine 
