Web Hosting by Netfirms | Free Domain Names by Netfirms

Giles Goodland

Notes towards a History of The Cento  

Art recycles. All kinds of art, in whatever sphere, are recyclings of previous arts. Sometimes this is obvious, sometimes hidden. In the case of literature, and especially poetry, there are of course influences, and there is of course plagiarism, but there is also a long and often obscured tradition that openly recycles previous poetries. The relationship between poetry and copying or open appropriation has been pushed aside because it does not sit well with a belief in individual authorship. Collage was an invention of modernism in the early twentieth century that sought to achieve affects through shock-value. However, by proposing the quoted element as an ‘other’, collage in literature seldom broke away from the duality posited by the core conception of authorship: originality versus unoriginal writing. Several generations after modernism, practitioners of collage still claim that what they do is ‘new’.[i] Literary historians have tacitly agreed with this by not looking for antecedents.[ii]

I am in sympathy with the modernist impetus to make things new. However, as a practitioner of collage in poetry, I also believe it is time to look at collage as a recurrent tendency that predates modernism, in order that current poetic practice can move on.[iii]

Language is sticky. It never dries out. When Picasso and his friends first used collage in painting, they knew that on the canvas, glue dries. When this term collage (from the French coller, to glue) leapt into the medium of literature, it never stuck in the same way, because even before literacy, there was a tendency in poetry to borrow, or at least to share. Poets are doomed to use the same words as their predecessors, and often much more. It has often been argued that oral epics such as those ascribed to Homer are the result of a great deal of sharing and gluing together of units: lines, similes, set-pieces, kennings, heroic metaphors. The first literary works in many cultures, and the poetry of any pre-literate culture, are the result of a team effort that depends on a poet memorizing and reciting the words of many previous generations.

 It was only after the development of a culture of writing, and in particular printing, that individual authorship became an idea. Thus it is appropriate that the first use of collage in written poetry owes much to many-minded Homer.

The cento as a form was first developed in ancient Greece when poets started stitching together their own poems entirely from lines or verses taken  from Homer. This form of poetry later became known as the cento, from the Latin word for patchwork, or perhaps from kentron, a Greek word meaning to graft trees. Not many of these have survived from Classical Greek literature. In Aristophanes’ play Peace (421 B.C.), an oracle recites a jumble of Homeric phrases. In the Palatine Anthology there are three short centos. Irenaeus quotes a ten-line cento about Heracles. At Memnon in Egypt, there is a seven-line cento inscribed as a graffito onto the leg of a statue. Some Greek magical papyri use jumbled lines from Homer as a form of incantation. In the fourth century C.E. a Bishop named Patricius wrote several, which were expanded by Eudocia Athenais, wife of the Theodosius II, in the fifth century C.E.

More varied and complete examples can be found in Latin literature, mostly using Virgil instead of Homer. The earliest fully developed example is by Hosidius Geta in the 2nd century A.D., who wrote a version of Medea in which the characters all speak in Virgilian hexameters, with the choric lyrics all ending in final half-hexameters from Virgil.

The best-known user of this form was Ausonius, who (on the orders of the Emperor Valentinian) wrote a Cento Nuptialis, a celebration of a wedding-night. Ausonius described his technique in a preface.[iv]

They who first amused themselves this way, called it a Cento. The chief burden lies on the memory to collect what had been dispersed, and to put the several scraps together, and when this is done, it deserves to be laughed at, rather than commended.[v]

Dryden wrote of these poems in his translation of the satires of Juvenal:

They were Satyrique Poems, full of Parodies; that is, of Verses patch’d up from great Poets, and turn’d into another Sence than their Author intended them. Such amongst the Romans is the famous Cente of Ausonius; where the words are Virgil’s: But by applying them to another Sense, they are made a relation of a Wedding-Night; and the Act of Consummation fulsomely describ’d in the very words of the most Modest among all Poets.[vi]

Dryden himself was one of the few English-language poets to attempt a translation of the Cento Nuptialis:

Let Venus, and her Son, profusely spread

The Genial Pleasures of the Bridal Bed,

Fair as the Field, so fruitful be the Soil,

And answer yearly to the Tiller’s Toil.

When the nine Moons their destined Course shall end,

Thee, Goddess of the Night, thy Succour lend;

And, as the Mother’s Labour stronger grows,

Assist, Latona, and relieve her Throes.[vii]

More Violent he grows, and she more Kind,

The rising Raptures break her swelling Sighs.

And breathless in the Bridegroom’s Arms she lies.[viii]

Green, the editor of the most recent scholarly edition of Ausonius’s poems, comments that this is ‘one of the most detailed descriptions of sexual intercourse in Latin literature, and also one of the most violent. The violence… could have been a concession to Valentinian’s tastes.’ Ausonius admits in his preface, perhaps with a touch of self-deprecation, that his intention was humorous. It is hard not to feel something subversive to the canon in appropriating Virgil to such an extent.

Ausonius’ use of this technique was decidedly secular. In the early Christian period, however, the cento form was used as a means of propagating the faith and educating the faithful, by combining pagan learning with Christian verse; for instance the female poet Proba about 360 A.D. used verses from Virgil to paraphrase parts of the Bible, constructing a summary of the Biblical creation story and the lives of the evangelists[ix]. Her poetry was very popular in this early Christian period, perhaps answering a need for secular works such as those of Virgil to be made palatable to Christians. Some have argued that Proba was simply bowdlerizing Virgil to get around laws prohibiting the use of overtly Christian texts in schools.[x] Saint Jerome disliked the form and complained in a letter to Paulinus of Nola in the year 395 about composers of centos:

they reckon whatever they say is the law of God and they do not see fit to find out what the prophets and apostles thought, but rather fit to their own private meaning passages that have nothing to do with that meaning, as if it were some great feat (and not a depraved method of exposition) to have an author’s intention violated, and to make scripture conform to their own will, though in fact that same scripture flies in their face. As if we haven’t read the Homeric and Virgilian centos—though there is no way we can claim that Virgil was a Christian without Christ… These things are childish—like a game for busy-bodies—teaching what you know nothing about, or rather.. not even knowing your ignorance.[xi]

The form first appeared in Britain in 1608, with William Bellenden’s Cicero Princeps, a treatise on government compiled from the writings of Cicero. Alexander Ross, another Scotsman, attached to the court of James I and VI, wrote Virgilii Evangelisantis Christiados, a Christianizing of Virgil in 13 books, in 1638. These books were somewhat dry and, to modern readers, irrelevant, not least because they were in Latin. There is, however, some evidence that the cento form was influential on later Western literature. Milton was aware of the form,[xii] as, apparently, was Joyce.[xiii] It is certain that in the eighteenth century poets had their own English equivalent of Homer and Virgil in Shakespeare, and started to compose centos on the classical model, but with Shakespeare as their source. Richard Berenger around the year 1763 wrote ‘On the Birth-Day of Shakespear. A Cento. Taken from his Works.’ As the first cento in English that I have been able to trace, it is worth quoting from:

Peace to this meeting,

Joy and fair time, health and good wishes!

Now, good friends, the cause why we are met,

Is in celebration of the day that gave

Immortal Shakespear to this favour’d isle,

The most replenished sweet work of nature,

Which from the prime creation e’er she framed.

O thou divinest nature! how thyself thou blazons’st

In this thy son! form’d in thy prodigality,

To hold thy mirror up, and give the time,

Its very form and pressure! When he speaks

Each aged ear plays truant at his tales,

And younger hearings are quite ravished,

So voluble is his discourse…[xiv]

A later poem using the same method was written by Thomas Love Peacock in Palmyra and other Poems in 1806. It is a witty address to his reviewers, using only phrases from Shakespeare:

I hear a voice cry: “Horrible! most horrible!

Ye Gods! how vilely does this cynic rhyme!

Oh! He’s as tedious as a twice-told tale,

Worse than the forc’d gait of a shuffling nag!”

Though all that I can do is little worth

With your displeasure piec’d, my good intent

May carry through itself: no levell’d malice

Infects one comma in the course I hold.

Under your good correction, if I speed,

And my invention thrive, then will I say,

Your love deserves my thanks: so farewell, gentlemen.[xv]

Centos in this strict sense are sometimes encountered, as something of an oddity, even in modern poetry. John Peck (in the guise of the Chinese poet Hi-Lo) constructed a poem from Rilke’s Valais Quatrains:

much shadow without doubt seeps in

threatened and redeemed

mixed from sweet evening, pure metal

wine: ardent comet.[xvi]

Encountering them in contemporary poetry, one is often surprised to find them as part of the repertoire of formalist poetry, perhaps because the word cento has found its way into various manuals of poetic forms. For instance in New England Review we find a poet composing a ‘Nuptial Cento’ modelled on that of Ausonius, but using Shakespeare as a source:

Friends, Romans, countrymen, I greet thy love.

Bestow upon the eyes of this young couple,

that twixt heaven and earth hangs weights upon

my tongue, fairest boding dreams. A thousand thousand

blessings.[xvii]

Poetry like this seems uninteresting to me. It seems too much like a parlour game or an amusing diversion, unable to form an interesting poem in its own right. The problem is perhaps due to how we construct the figure of the author, in the period after the invention of printing. Virgil and Homer were often memorized, so constructing a cento was an art of recollecting the fragments buried in the head (Ausonius claims to have made his in one day and night). The classical centos are interesting because they are comfortable in being stitched together from the body of a previous poet, because these older poets already lived in the heads of the cento-writers. Once making a cento becomes a matter of leafing through a book, or utilising a search-engine, it becomes too clear that there is little reason to centre on one canonical author. Things could be so much more interesting if instead of concentrating on a single author as a source, the net was spread wider.

It is perhaps surprising to find that Wordsworth wrote what he called centos. His apologetic note on the subject is illuminating. He writes of his cento:

not a word of it is original: it is simply a fine stanza of Akenside, connected with a still finer from Beattie, by a couplet from Thomson. This practice, in which the author sometimes indulges, of linking together, in his own mind, favourite passages from different authors, seems in itself unobjectionable; but, as the publishing such compilations might lead to confusion in literature, he would deem himself inexcusable in giving this specimen, were it not from a hope that it might open to others a harmless source of private gratification.[xviii]

Wordsworth’s apologeticness is illuminating. Unlike in the Classical period, the cento form in English literature was never anything more than an unusual diversion. With the advent of printing, an ideological shift had occurred. The relationship of writers to the words they produced became proprietorial. Writing was now a source of income. It was thus property, and something to be protected. Hence in Wordsworth’s opinion it was risky to publish centos, but a common practice in his private creative endeavours. One could say that centos were still produced, but they were not so often named as such.

It took a long period of literary experimentation before poetry within a modernist or post-modernist framework could rediscover the cento, and suggest how to make it lively again. The Oulipo group were interested in the idea of the cento, but did not use it in the traditional manner: ‘no purely traditional centos have been written by members of the group’.[xix] The closest they came was Jacques Roubaud’s Second Litanies of the Virgin, in which the author collected 200 palinodic lines from chants royaux written in honour of the Virgin, a genre stretching from 1480 to 1620, and assembled them into new poems. The Oulipo group produced several more works that were centoesque, and they were an influence on poets such as John Ashbery and Ted Berrigan, whose centos are questioning towards their sources.

But perhaps some of the most interesting developments of the cento in the twentieth century and beyond did not call it by that name. I am thinking of John Cage’s appropriations from Joyce, Tom Phillips’ plundering of a little-known Victorian novel to make the Humument, and Ronald Johnson constructing Radi Os from Paradise Lost. More recently, Jen Bervin made a similar reduction of Shakespeare’s Sonnets to produce Nets. In these poems/artworks the process is as central as the poem. The relationship to the source text is one of process and chance.

After modernism, centos in the classical form can appear as curiosities of formalism, provoking mild curiosity, nothing much else. But the idea of appropriating sentences or fragments from other writers in a programmatic way—not simply collaging with apparent random abandon—remains a powerful model for me. If we move beyond the convenient idea of collage as an invention of the avant-garde, it is possible to see it as a device available for making complicated points about appropriation, our relationship to texts in other discourses, including from canonical literature, and the daily trivial texts that surround us. In my own poetry I have been selecting large numbers of ephemeral texts from the print media and assembling them in order of date to make arguments, critiques, or just poems that can walk on their own.

home

Copyright © Giles Goodland