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

E.g. cento = hundred; centro = centre; cerbo = brain; certa = certain; cirkonstanco = circumstance; civila = civil, etc.

From International Language Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar by Walter John Clark

A cento has been made of these, which has run through a particular description of newspapers, and excited a disapprobation even in friendly minds, which nothing but the reading of the book will cure.

From Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 4 by Thomas Jefferson Randolph

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 old themes and verses aimed at producing decorous centos culled from the works of classical rhetoricians and poets.

From Cambridge Essays on Education by Various

Parables and brief discourses, or rather, centos of religious and ethical exhortations and injunctions.

From Collected Essays, Volume V Science and Christian Tradition: Essays by Thomas Henry Huxley

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

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