cento

Author’s Note: A cento, from the Latin for “patchwork,” is a collage poem composed of lines from other sources.

From Scientific American ● Feb. 4, 2023

If not, it should, for Robert Irwin’s ingenious historical fantasy “Wonders Will Never Cease” is a contemporary novelist’s version of the poetic form known as a cento.

From Washington Post ● Dec. 27, 2017

While reading a cento, one savored its imaginative repurposing of bits from Horace, Virgil and any number of lesser ancients.

From Washington Post ● Dec. 27, 2017

By the best sculptors it is always used with this symbolic meaning, by the cinque cento sculptors as an ornament merely.

From The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) by John Ruskin

“His style is a laborious mixture of archaisms, a motley cento, with the aid of which he conceals the poverty of his knowledge and ideas.”

From Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 11, Slice 2 "French Literature" to "Frost, William" by Various

And so, I wanted to do what I could to discourage people from doing that and that's where the centos come in.

From Salon ● Mar. 5, 2019

Some are made up of stanzas from several different predecessors, others are almost centos of stock phrases.

From Robert Burns How To Know Him by William Allan Neilson

The temptation to father their own verses, or centos which they pieced together from sources known only to themselves, upon some poet of antiquity was all the stronger because they ran little risk of detection.

From A Literary History of the Arabs by Reynold Nicholson

The Empress Eudoxia wrote the life of Jesus Christ, in centos taken from Homer; Proba Falconia from Virgil.

From Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 by Isaac Disraeli

This fourth series of Hymns from the Office Books of The Holy Eastern Church, differs from the preceding three in this, that the hymns are less translations or renderings, and more centos and suggestions.

From Hymns from the East Being Centos and Suggestions from the Office Books of the Holy Eastern Church by John Brownlie