Home › Glossary › Letter L

lyric cento

Form
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A cento—a poem made entirely of quoted lines—constructed exclusively from existing lyric poetry.

Detailed Definition
Lyric cento is a collage poem composed entirely of lines or fragments borrowed from other lyric poems, reassembled to create a new, cohesive emotional or thematic statement; this intertextual form honors source texts while generating fresh meaning through juxtaposition, as practiced by poets like Annie Dillard or Mary Jo Bang.
Example
Example in poetry:
lyric cento (A poem composed entirely of lines or passages borrowed from existing lyric poems by other authors); A poem made up solely of famous lines from various love sonnets; A pastiche created by stitching together lines from different Romantic era poems
Additional Notes
A poem composed entirely of lines or passages borrowed from the works of one or more other poets; a form of collage or pastiche; related to mosaic verse or patchwork poetry.
Also Known As
Centonic lyric Compilation lyric Patchwork lyric Centosonic
Skip to main content