I hope this thread is still warm enough to be revived, because this is something I've been thinking about lately. I've recently had a long break from poetry (and from Eratosphere -- hello again, everyone!), both writing it and, for the most part, reading it. So the only poems I've given attention to are the ones that insisted their way into my consciousness from memory. I would have thought that the most memorable poems would be accentual-syllabic -- that they're more regular, thus more easily memorized, thus more apt to be remembered. But that hasn't been the case, at least for me; the poems I keep reciting to myself are almost all accentual or loose iambic. There was some metrical theorist, I forget who, who proposed that an irregular number of unstressed syllables "strengthens" the stressed ones. In any case, I suppose there's some good reason accentual meter persists so strongly in nursery rhymes, counting and clapping games, and other children's verse. And as Tim points out, accentual verse goes much further back in English poetry than accentual-syllabic verse does.
Here is one accentual poem I love, by Richard Wilbur. It's 3-5-3, with some lines that arguably deviate from the pattern (and one line that inarguably does, for a good content-driven reason).
THE WRITER
In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.
I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.
Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.
But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which
The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and is silent.
I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash
And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, dark, wild
And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,
And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,
It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.
It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.
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