Ed, you haven't been paying attention to anything I've said. I NEVER flat out state that any technique, device, syntactical anomaly or utter weirdness is ALWAYS wrong. There are no absolutes. My contention is simply that inversion is often a trick used by amateur poets who think that it's necessary to alter word order to shoehorn a line into the correct meter and rhyme, or to make it sound "more like Shakespeare". You will find -- very occasionally -- inversions in my own lines for the precise reason that you state: to promote a word for the sake of meaning. However, I will also strongly second Milo's statement that good meter can always be written without any recourse to yodafication. Contrary to some opinions, writing in perfect meter is not the sign of an amateur poet but an indication of a poet's natural tendency to write in perfect meter, nothing more. Whether that meter also equals perfect scansion is always going to be debatable, because scansion experts never agree on anything and will argue over shades of grey until their teeth fall out. This keeps scansion experts happy, and also keeps poets happy, as it means that those who are excessively anal about scansion aren't writing poetry to make our eyes bleed.
Knowing about feet isn't the same thing as using them. Those with the most facility will know all the rules well enough to break them without it seeming unnatural.
Knowing about feet isn't the same thing as using them. Those with the most facility will know all the rules well enough to break them without it seeming unnatural.
It could be worse