A cento is a poem made entirely of lines from other poems. Every line is a quotation. Nothing is original. The whole craft is in the selection and the arrangement.
Done badly, a cento is a scrapbook. Done well, it is one of the most honest forms in English. Because every poem is already a cento. The cento just admits it.
What a Cento Is
The word comes from the Latin cento, a patchwork cloak sewn together from rags. As a poetic form, the name is older than English. The Romans had centos. A poet named Ausonius in the fourth century wrote a full-length cento using only lines from Virgil. Proba, another late Roman writer, made a cento of the Old and New Testament stories entirely out of Virgil lines. The form was a demonstration of mastery, a puzzle, and a devotion all at once.
In contemporary English-language poetry the cento is rarer than it should be. Peter Gizzi, Susan Howe, David Lehman, and John Ashbery have all written centos or cento-adjacent poems. David Lehman edited an anthology of them, The Oxford Book of American Poetry, that includes several. The contemporary tradition is small but real.
The rule is simple. Every line in the poem is quoted from somewhere. You do not change the words. You choose them, you arrange them, and you let the accidental music of the arrangement do the work.
Why This Form Is Honest
Every poet you read is already assembling. They are taking rhythms they learned from other poets, syntactic habits from other writers, images that echo what they have read, vocabulary that carries a whole tradition. The poem that looks like a solo performance is a chorus, whether the poet admits it or not.
A cento makes this visible. You are not pretending to be original. You are arranging a conversation.
This is not a small thing. Most poems lie a little about their sources. The cento refuses to.
How to Write One
Pick a single source first. This is the easiest way in. Choose a poet whose work you know well and whose rhythms you can hear without thinking. Walt Whitman is a classic starting point because his lines are long, self-contained, and endlessly recombinable. Emily Dickinson is another classic choice for the opposite reason — her lines are short, sharp, and almost aphoristic.
Read through your chosen source and copy out every line that catches you. Do not stop to decide if it is useful. Just collect. You want a pool of maybe fifty to a hundred candidate lines.
Then start arranging. Look for accidental rhyme. Look for lines whose subjects connect. Look for contrasts. Look for a line that wants to open the poem and a line that wants to close it. The first and last lines of a cento carry disproportionate weight. Choose those carefully.
Read your arrangement out loud. The sound has to hold together. If two consecutive lines have incompatible rhythms, move one of them. The cento is governed by sonic logic more than narrative logic. You are composing by ear.
Revise ruthlessly. Cut lines that are only there because you liked them. The final poem should feel inevitable, not arbitrary. If a reader cannot tell why a line is in a particular position, the line is not doing enough.
An Example
Here is a short cento assembled entirely from lines in Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, section titles and canto divisions ignored. I have cited it as a single source at the end.
A Cento from Song of Myself
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,
and I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man.
I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul.
Agonies are one of my changes of garments.
I know I am deathless.
I am satisfied, I see, dance, laugh, sing.
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love.
Missing me one place search another.
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
Source: Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 1855 edition, various sections. Public domain.
The arrangement does not try to summarize Whitman. It argues with him a little. The ten-line shape forces selection. Every line I kept had to work beside the ones above and below it. The rhythm of the long Whitman line held the poem together because the source held it together.
This is a one-source cento, the easiest kind. Multi-source centos are harder because the rhythms and registers of different poets fight. But the principle is the same. Choose. Arrange. Listen.
Where Centos Fail
Three ways.
First, when the poet is showing off their reading. A cento that strings together the most famous lines from the most famous poets reads as a greatest-hits compilation. It is not a poem. It is a playlist. The best centos use lines that are not famous, so the arrangement has to carry the weight.
Second, when the arrangement has no argument. A cento has to do something. It has to make a claim, frame a scene, build toward a realization, or at least create a mood that holds. A random arrangement of beautiful lines is not a poem. It is an anthology.
Third, when the sources are credited in a way that overshadows the poem. Some poets put elaborate footnotes after every line. This is fine for a scholarly edition. It is awful in a reading. The standard practice now is to cite sources at the end of the poem in a single note, so the reader experiences the cento first as a poem and only afterward learns where the lines came from. Trust the form to work on its own first.
What the Form Teaches
Even if you never write a cento, practicing one teaches you something about how poems work.
You learn that the rhythm of a line is often what makes it stay in the reader’s memory. The meaning matters. The sound matters more than you think.
You learn that most lines you love carry their context with them. Pulling a line out of its original poem and putting it in a new neighborhood is revealing. Some lines transplant easily. Others die without the soil they grew in.
You learn how much of a poem is the intervals between lines. A cento is the same lines in a different order, and that different order is a different poem.
You learn that originality, as most poets understand it, is a weaker concept than selection. A poet who can choose and arrange is a poet regardless of whether they invented the words.
A Prompt
Open a book by a poet you admire. Not a famous one. Someone you keep coming back to. Copy out twenty lines that catch you. Do not think too hard about why.
Then assemble twelve of them into a poem. Keep the order of the words within each line. Change nothing else.
Read it aloud. Rearrange. Cut. Try again.
Put the final arrangement in a drawer. Read it again in a week.
If it still holds, you have a cento. If it does not, you have a set of lines you understand better than you did.
Either way, you have been honest about what writing actually is.