At the risk of rehashing some of what's already been said, although maybe from a slightly different angle, I want to recall the origins of poetry in music -- hence the double meaning of "lyric." The Beowulf poet, already mentioned, sang his compositions. Music is, among other things, inherently rhythmic, or western music is, at least. Fitting words to music inevitably becomes a task of matching word stresses to the accented notes. The number of accents per line (and line was as much a melodic unit as a verbal one, I suppose) varies, but beyond five they begin to tax the singer's and listeners' memories; seven or so "things" seems to be toward the maximum number we can easily commit to memory as "one." But we can have fewer for the sake of the specific melody.
Free verse is often accused to not being musical, but those who make the accusation might not realize that they're speaking more than figuratively. I like good free verse, but to my ear its music is sporadic, like the little snatches of coherence you get in Stravinsky. And as in Stravinsky, that swirl of change can be very expressive, but expressive of something very different from what metrical verse expresses. (I have a pet theory that metrical verse almost always expresses a poet's perhaps unconscious assumptions about the orderliness of the world, but that theory would drag us back to the debate about whether formal poets are generally more conservative than free versers, and as a long-time weak-kneed liberal, I don't want to go there!)
So to me it's music. If you have the music deeply enough embedded in your bones, don't waste money on a book on prosody. If you need a little help now and then, get one. By the way, John Hollander's little "Rhyme's Reason" is a delight for the way it gives its definitions in the verse form being defined -- even if you don't need the help with prosody, it's great fun.
RPW
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