I watched Gioia give a meter course to beginners and he told them don't make any substitutions except first foot trochees in I.P. Probably good advice for beginners, but how we'd be impoverished if great poets followed it. The greats can make meter do anything, and the best way to develop your ear is to memorize them. Let's take fem line ends in unrhymed lines:
"When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight. Somewhere in sands of the desert"
Someone told me The Second Coming is Yeats' greatest free verse! Of course it's hypermetric blank verse.
Anapestic substitutions are fine in what Frost called "loose iambics." But they require metrical context.
"Grief may have thought it was grief.
Care may have thought it was care.
But neither one was the thief
Of his raven color of hair."
You've rightly pointed out that an acephalic (or catalectic) beginning is fine, but sn unstressed syllable can also be gracefully dropped in the middle if it follows a full caesura, preferably punctuated.
Pyrrhic/spondees can work anywhere in the line:
"We grieve for the TWELVE TREES we lost last night,
pillars of our community, OLD FRIENDS"
Let me say for the umpteenth time that All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing (Ohio University Press) is our definitive new prosody manual. In it Tim Steele analyzes every conceivable permutation of the iambic line, shows how the Greats can get away with murder and how you can too!
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