Canto: A major division or subsection within a long narrative poem or an epic. The word is Italian for "song" or "chant." Cantos are analogous to chapters in a novel or acts in a play, serving to organize a large and complex work into more manageable sections. Epics such as Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy (divided into Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, each comprising cantos) and Ezra Pound's Cantos are structured using this unit of division. The use of cantos allows the poet to develop multiple episodes, characters, and themes over a great length while maintaining a sense of structural coherence for the reader. It is a key feature of the epic form, enabling the telling of vast, sweeping stories on a monumental scale.

Canto is a major division of a long poem, akin to a chapter; used in epics (e.g., Dante’s Divine Comedy) and modern sequences (e.g., Pound’s Cantos) to organize thematic or narrative segments.