Definition of "canto" [can•to]

• One of the principal divisions of a long poem. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "It follows the ecotopian revision of Isaiah 11 in canto viii, where babies sport with basilisks and lions lie mutated into lambs, and 'no longer now/He slays the lamb that looks him in the face/And horribly devours his mangled flesh' (211)."
• "Shelley's use of the poetics of spice in canto viii of Queen Mab and the 'Fragment of an Unfinished Drama' is an example of the poetry of ornamentation and sentimentality which spawned Ecotopia, and an acknowledgement that commercial capitalism has its metonymic flows as well."
• "The metamorphosis of lion into lamb in canto viii is also fractal: we are unsure whether he is now exactly like a lamb."