Bill,
In answer to your question, what's the point, I would say that, for an experienced poet who has internalized metrical conventions and fleshed them out with his or her ear to taste, there's not necessarily any point in going back to school and bringing the elements of scansion up from memory -- though even an experienced poet may be interested in comparing his or her practice to others', which seemed to be the gist of Tony's question. For a less experienced poet, by contrast, learning scansion is essential to learning to operate in meter. It is especially important for a beginner to understand the role of substitutions and not mistake the background for the foreground. It is also useful to have relatively objective measurements available to counter oversubjective personal readings that no one else will discover.
In addition, scansion provides a supplemental notation as to how a line should be read. It's not always self-evident from the page. Heidi's example of Frost's personal scansion demonstrates this. In the example Clive and I discussed, "Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit," I think the second foot is reversed, Clive does not. If you were going to perform it, you would want to know where to put the stress before opening your mouth.
So that's two points, to educate the student and to annotate the poem for performance. But maybe scansion isn't as important as discovering a new recipe for chickpeas? Best, Bill
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