Cento
Quick answer: A cento is a patchwork poem assembled entirely from lines by other poets, rearranged into new meaning. Learn the form's history, ethics and method.
A cento is a poem composed entirely of lines taken from other poets' work, stitched into a new whole. The name is Latin for a patchwork cloak, which describes the method exactly: nothing in a strict cento is written by its assembler except the arrangement, and the arrangement is everything. Meaning arrives from collision, from what line seventeen of one poet does when it lands beside line three of another.
The form matters because it makes a radical claim quietly: that reading is a kind of writing, and that a poet's taste, memory and sense of juxtaposition are creative instruments in themselves. Writing a cento is also the most intimate reading exercise there is. You cannot borrow a line well until you have understood what it does at home.
How It Works
The strict rules: every line must come from an existing poem, lines are quoted whole, and the sources are traditionally many rather than one. The assembler controls order, lineation and stanza breaks, and those choices generate tone the source poets never intended, comedy from solemn lines, elegy from light ones. Most modern centos append a credits list naming every source. Looser variants allow small changes of tense or pronoun for grammatical glue, and some poets write half-centos, alternating borrowed lines with their own; purists frown, readers rarely mind, but you should say what you did.
Where You Will See It
The form is ancient. Roman poets built centos from Virgil's lines, most notoriously the fourth-century Cento Nuptialis of Ausonius, which repurposes the national epic for a wedding entertainment, and Faltonia Betitia Proba assembled a Virgilian cento telling Christian scripture. Byzantine writers did the same with Homer. The modern revival treats the cento as homage and experiment: John Ashbery wrote one, anthologists have compiled collaborative centos from famous first lines, and creative writing courses assign the form because it teaches the anatomy of the line faster than any lecture.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Read with a notebook and harvest lines that stop you, fifty or more before you try assembling. Work from public domain poets if you plan to publish, since a cento of recent copyrighted lines sits in murky legal territory; pre-1928 poetry gives you Dickinson, Keats, Whitman and centuries more to quilt from. Lay your lines out where you can see them all, then listen for pairs that spark. Build around those collisions, keep the pronouns consistent enough to follow, and always publish your source list. The credits are part of the form's honesty.
What poets can take from this
- Choose a loose theme before harvesting so your collected lines can talk to each other.
- Mix line lengths and registers deliberately; a cento of uniformly grand lines goes numb.
- Read the assembled draft aloud to catch grammatical seams between borrowed lines.
- Keep a precise record of every source as you harvest, not afterwards.
- If you alter any borrowed line, even a pronoun, disclose it in your credits note.
Try it yourself
Build a twelve-line cento about night using only lines from public domain poets, drawing no more than two lines from any single poet. Arrange them so the poem moves from dusk to dawn, then add a credit for every line.
Questions
Is a cento plagiarism?
Not when done openly. The cento is a recognised form more than sixteen centuries old, and its convention is full disclosure: readers know every line is borrowed, and modern centos list their sources. Concealing the borrowing is what would make it plagiarism.
Can I use copyrighted poems in a cento?
Legally it is a grey area, since a cento reproduces entire lines. For publication, the safe path is public domain work, generally poems published before 1928, or securing permissions. For private exercises, use anything that teaches you.
What is the difference between a cento and found poetry?
A cento borrows exclusively from poems and works line by line. Found poetry lifts language from non-poetic sources, news reports, manuals, overheard speech, and reshapes it. Both make poems from existing text, but they raid different territories.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.