Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun One of the principal divisions of a long poem.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A part or division of a poem of some length: as, the six cantos of “The Lady of the Lake.”
- noun In music; the highest voice-part in concerted music; soprano.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun One of the chief divisions of a long poem; a book.
- noun (Mus.) The highest vocal part; the air or melody in choral music; anciently the tenor, now the soprano.
- noun (Mus.) the plain ecclesiastical chant in cathedral service; the plain song.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun One of the chief
divisions of a longpoem ; abook .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a major division of a long poem
- noun the highest part (usually the melody) in a piece of choral music
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
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Examples
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Shelley's use of the poetics of spice in canto viii of Queen Mab and the 'Fragment of an Unfinished Drama' is an example of the poetry of ornamentation and sentimentality which spawned Ecotopia, and an acknowledgement that commercial capitalism has its metonymic flows as well.
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The metamorphosis of lion into lamb in canto viii is also fractal: we are unsure whether he is now exactly like a lamb.
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It follows the ecotopian revision of Isaiah 11 in canto viii, where babies sport with basilisks and lions lie mutated into lambs, and 'no longer now/He slays the lamb that looks him in the face/And horribly devours his mangled flesh' (211).
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A woman and a man, who read the last tercets aaaof a certain canto.
jorge luis borges | the just « poetry dispatch & other notes from the underground 2009
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The Poem therefore (with the exception of the first canto, which is purely introductory) is narrative, not didactic.
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The Poem therefore (with the exception of the first canto, which is purely introductory) is narrative, not didactic.
The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley — Volume 1 Percy Bysshe Shelley 1807
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The Poem therefore (with the exception of the first canto, which is purely introductory) is narrative, not didactic.
The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley — Complete Percy Bysshe Shelley 1807
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943 I omit the rest of this canto, which is mere repetition.
Ramayana. English Valmiki 1866
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But in the 1880s, as the effort got under way to make the Irish respectable by returning them to their imagined roots, Olcott was recruited to perform “authentic” Irish songs in an operatic, bel canto style.
A Renegade History of the United States Thaddeus Russell 2010
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He's just finished rehearsing the Act One finale of the Metropolitan Opera's new production of Rossini's "Le Comte Ory," a lesser-known bel canto work that he calls "a really great French pastry made by an incredible Italian chef."
Bringing Fresh Eyes to the Opera Thomas Dyja 2011
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