Строфа: от античной оды к современной поэзии.

First part of the ode; structural division of a poem

A strophe ('/s//t//r//oʊ//f//iː/) is a poetic term originally referring to the first part of the ode in Ancient Greek tragedy, followed by the antistrophe and epode. The term has been extended to also mean a structural division of a poem containing stanzas of varying line length. Strophic poetry is to be contrasted with poems composed line by line non stanzaically, such as Greek epic poems or English blank verse, to which the term stichic applies. In its original Greek setting, "strophe, antistrophe and epode were a kind of stanza framed only for the music", as John Milton wrote in the preface to Samson Agonistes, with the strophe chanted by a Greek chorus as it moved from right to left across the scene.

Strophe (from Greek στροφή, "turn, bend, twist") is a concept in versification which properly means a turn, as from one foot to another, or from one side of a chorus to the other.

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 likely that earlier poets were acquainted with it. The arrangement of an ode in a splendid and consistent artifice of strophe, antistrophe and epode was carried to its height by Pindar.

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 Keats' Ode to a Nightingale or Matthew Arnold's The Scholar Gipsy. A strophic form of poetry called Muwashshah developed in Andalucia as early as the 9th century CE, which then spread to North Africa and the Middle East. Muwashshah was typically in classical Arabic, with the refrain sometimes in the local dialect.

The term strophe is used in modern and post modern criticism to indicate "long non isomorphic units" of verse whereas the term "stanza [is used] for more regular ones".