STROPHE (Gr. o-rpod>)  , from orpE4ecv, to turn), a term in' versification which properly means a turn, as from one foot to another, or from one side of a chorus to the other . In its precise choral significance a strophe was a definite section in the structure of an ode, when, as in Milton's famous phrase in the preface to Samson Agonistes, " strophe, antistrophe and epode were a kind of stanzas framed only for the music." In a more general sense the strophe is a collection of various prosodical periods combined into a structural unit . In modern poetry the strophe usually becomes identical with the stanza, and it is the arrangement and the recurrence of the rhymes which give it its character . But the ancients called a combination of verse-periods a system, and gave the name strophe to such a system only when it was repeated once or more in unmodified form . It is said that Archilochus first created the strophe by binding together systems of two or three lines . But it was the Greek ode-writers who introduced the practice of strophe-writing on a large scale, and the art was attributed to Stesichorus, although it is probable that earlier poets were acquainted with it . The arrangement of an ode in a splendid and consistent artifice of strophe, anti-strophe and epode was carried to its height by Pindar (see ODE) . With the development of Greek prosody, various peculiar strophe-forms came into general acceptance, and were made celebrated by the frequency with which leading poets employed them . Among these were the Sapphic, the Elegiac, the Alcaic and the Asclepiadean strophe, all of them prominent in Greek and Latin verse . The briefest and the most ancient strophe is the dactylic distich, which consists of two verses of the same class of rhythm, the second producing a melodic counterpart to the first . The forms in modern English verse which reproduce most exactly the impression aimed at by the ancient ode-strophe are the elaborate rhymed stanzas of such poems as the " Nightingale " of Keats or the " Scholar-Gypsy " of Matthew Arnold (see VERSE) .