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

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

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

Various insects, like everything else in the world, occur in cinque cento work; grasshoppers most frequently.

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

There are constant repetitions, and it sometimes seems, and may sometimes be the case, that the text is a mere cento of different and repeated versions.

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

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

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

It is humiliating to contrast the reception of these empty echoes of inspiration, these agreeable centos, with that of such genuine, although faulty poems, as Keat's "Endymion," Shelley's "Queen Mab," and Wordsworth's "Lyrical Ballads."

From The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, Volume 1 by George Gilfillan

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