What Is a Cento Poem?
Quick answer: A cento poem is a patchwork built entirely from other poets' lines. Learn the form's ancient history, the etiquette of borrowing and how to stitch your own.
A cento is a poem assembled entirely from lines written by other poets, rearranged to make something new. The word is Latin for a cloak stitched from patches, and the name is exact: the cento writer contributes no lines of their own, only the selection, the order and the strange new electricity that jumps between borrowed lines when they are set side by side. A cento about grief might open with Emily Dickinson, answer her with Keats, and close with Frost, three voices that never met, suddenly finishing each other's sentences.
It sounds like cheating and is anything but. Choosing a hundred lines from a thousand poems, then sequencing them so they build tension, keep a consistent register and land an ending, is closer to composing music from found sound than to copying. The form also carries obligations, because you are working with other people's property and other people's voices. Done carelessly, a cento is plagiarism with a fancy name. Done well, with sources credited and lines chosen from the public domain or with permission, it is one of the oldest and most generous games in poetry.
The poem
Because I could not stop for Death,
I have been half in love with easeful Death;
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
A demonstration cento assembled from lines by Emily Dickinson (1890), John Keats (1819) and Robert Frost (1923)
A patchwork with ancient seams
The cento is not a modern experiment; it is older than most of the forms we call traditional. Greek writers stitched new narratives out of lines lifted from Homer, and by the fourth century the Roman poet Ausonius had written his Cento Nuptialis, a wedding poem built entirely from fragments of Virgil, reportedly at the emperor's request. Around the same period Faltonia Betitia Proba, one of the earliest named women poets whose work survives, composed a long cento retelling Christian scripture using only Virgil's lines, an act of devotion and audacity in equal measure.
What these early centos reveal is the form's original spirit: intimate knowledge of a beloved source, displayed by transforming it. To build a poem from Virgil you had to hold Virgil practically by heart. The cento was proof of devotion the way a jazz musician's quotation of an old standard is proof of listening. That spirit survives. The best modern centos are love letters to a bookshelf.
How a cento actually works
The core rule is simple: every line must be borrowed. Beyond that, poets set their own constraints, and declaring your constraints is part of the craft. Some purists keep every line word-for-word intact. Others allow small grammatical smoothing, a tense shifted or a pronoun changed so the seams do not snag, and say so in a note. Changing anything more than that moves the poem out of cento territory.
Sequencing is where the real writing happens. Borrowed lines arrive with their own music, and your job is to make the metres and registers shake hands. A thumping tetrameter line will fight a long loose free verse line unless you place a hinge between them. Most cento writers gather far more material than they need, often five or ten times the final line count, then arrange, prune and rearrange the way a collagist works a table full of clippings.
A tiny worked example
Here is a four line cento assembled for this page from public domain lines, with the sources named afterwards. Read it first as a poem: it moves from a strange calm through longing to a weary resolve, and no single author planned that arc.
The first line is Emily Dickinson's, from 'Because I could not stop for Death' (1890). The second is John Keats, from 'Ode to a Nightingale' (1819). The third and fourth are Robert Frost, from 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' (1923). Three poets, three centuries of publication between them, one continuous thought about death and duty that none of them wrote alone. That jolt, when borrowed lines start conversing, is the entire reward of the form.
Copyright, credit and courtesy
A cento built from public domain work, which in practice means poems published before 1928 plus older material, is legally safe ground, and it is where beginners should start. Dickinson, Keats, Blake, Wordsworth, Rossetti, Whitman and early Frost offer more lines than you could exhaust in a lifetime. Using lines by living poets or recent work under copyright is murkier: a line or two may be defensible as fair dealing, but a whole poem woven from a contemporary collection without permission invites trouble, both legal and ethical.
Credit is non-negotiable regardless of copyright status. A cento that hides its sources is indistinguishable from plagiarism, and journals treat it as such. The standard courtesy is a note listing each poet and poem, in order of appearance or alphabetically. Far from spoiling the magic, the credits deepen it, because readers can trace each patch back to its original cloth and watch the transformation in both directions.
Why poets write centos at all
The cento is one of the best training exercises in poetry, which is why teachers assign it so often. Hunting for lines forces you to read closely and widely, and to notice which lines are self-sufficient. A line that survives transplanting has integrity: strong syntax, complete music, an image that carries its own weather. Spend a month building centos and you will start writing lines like that yourself, because you now know the difference from the inside.
The form also has genuine expressive power, especially for grief and homage. Poets have stitched memorial centos entirely from a dead friend's poems, letting the lost voice speak at its own funeral. Others use the cento to map an obsession or an era, gathering every line about the sea from a century of war poetry, say, until the arrangement makes an argument no essay could. The selection is the self-expression. What you choose to keep reveals you as surely as what you write.
Variations and close cousins
Once you know the cento, you start seeing its relatives everywhere. The half-cento alternates borrowed lines with your own, a duet between you and a poet you love. Erasure poetry works in reverse, carving a new poem out of an existing text by deleting most of it. The golden shovel, a form invented by Terrance Hayes in tribute to Gwendolyn Brooks, hides a borrowed line vertically: the last word of each of your lines, read downward, spells out the source line. Each variation negotiates the same question the cento raises directly: how do we make new art out of the art that made us?
For submissions, one practical note. Most contests, including Writory's monthly one, expect original work, so a cento should always declare itself and its sources plainly; an honest cento is a form, an undeclared one is an offence. When in doubt, ask the editor before you submit, and keep your credit note attached to the poem wherever it travels.
What poets can take from this
- Start with public domain poets, published before 1928, so copyright never complicates the craft.
- Harvest five times more lines than you need, copied exactly, each with its source noted immediately.
- Sort your gathered lines by mood and metre before arranging, the way a collagist sorts by colour.
- Read each draft aloud and listen for seams; a hinge line with neutral music can join two clashing registers.
- Keep a credits note attached to the poem from the first draft onward, not added later from memory.
- Try a single-poet cento of someone you love reading; it will teach you their voice from the inside.
Try it yourself
Build an eight line cento on the theme of doors or thresholds using only poems published before 1928, with no more than one line taken from any single poet, and write the credit note before you consider the poem finished.
Questions
Is a cento plagiarism?
Not when it is done honestly. A true cento announces itself as a patchwork and credits every source, which makes it homage and collage rather than theft. It becomes plagiarism the moment the borrowing is concealed, so the credit note is not optional decoration; it is what makes the form legitimate.
Do all the lines in a cento have to come from different poets?
No. The one-line-per-poet rule is a popular constraint, not a law. Single-poet centos, built entirely from one writer's work, are a recognised variation and can read like a portrait of that poet painted in their own words. Just state whichever rule set you used.
Can I submit a cento to a poetry contest?
Check the rules first, because most contests ask for original work and judges need to know what they are scoring. If centos are welcome, submit it clearly labelled with full credits. If the rules are silent, ask the organisers rather than assume; an email costs nothing and protects your reputation.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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