Andrew, you seem to have shut down this thread with your dissertation, which is a pity, since no one has really responded to Clive's call for an irreducable minimum, something to initiate young people or metrical beginners to a concept that keeps elaborating until it sometimes seems, well, devilish, as you suggest at the end of your comments.
While I largely follow and concur through your first two categories, I have some problems with your attempt to differentiate some metaphysical poetry on metrical grounds. It does not seem evident to me that we need posit a separate variety of metrical practice when we scan Milton or the other poets you mention. What they do seems to me more a matter of divergent personal styles and preferences within the larger category of "strict" accentual-syllabic meter.
In the last part of your comments on "lilt," you seem perplexed by the frequency of feminine endings in anapestic verse. That's because you haven't considered "line-wrap," a concept I only absorbed a year or so back. Juxtapose a feminine line ending with an initial iamb, and you get another pair of unstressed syllables, this time bridging the line break. Call it a "ghost anapest."
I could continue, but I would come no closer to answering Clive's question. For that I shall have to return another time.
A.S.
P.S. I often write with lilt myself, so I'm not quite the fundamentalist you suppose. As I have explained before, I urge beginners to write in strict meter because, as the old saw has it, you must walk before you can run--not to mention hop, skip, or jump.
Beginners need to identify and count stresses. It's not at all hard to do. They just have to listen to words, instead of looking at them. Of course this goes contrary to the early training in sight-reading that we all experience. That's why it's hard for some. The ones who listen more easily are often the musically-inclined, who already know how to sing.
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