Yes, Whitman is kind of like Milton, sui generis & not a useful model for others. Still, taken as a line of tetrameter,
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed
is such a strong, musical line, it would be hard to object to on "inversion" grounds in any poem, contemporary or ancient. (RPW did not present the title as an instance of inversion, but it serves my purpose.) Quality trumps fashion. It's when they show up in weak lines (i.e., usually) that inversions seem repugnantly "poetical" & perhaps a contributing cause of weakness & therefore to be eschewed.
Re. Oliver's very pertinent point: "Poetry goes through periods of artificiality and periodic readjustments to contemporary speech"
I wonder about this. One thinks of Wordsworth's "rebellion" against the artificiality of the Augustans, but then, much more drastically, Modernism's demolition of traditional form, poetic diction, poetic devices such as syntactical inversion, etc. One might think of Wordsworth as a "periodic readjustment" but Modernism seems like a much more violent break, & one that we are still living with almost a century later. Hardy is interesting in this regard in that, coming slightly before Modernism but subject to pretty much the same cultural dilemma, he chose a kind of "knowing anachronism," bravely carrying on the tradition in reduced circumstances, instead of turning against it as Modernism did. A certain poignancy in this. But it can't be emulated now insofar as one cannot honestly pretend that Modernism never happened.
Consider Modernism's defining moment, "The Waste Land": full of traditional forms, but strictly & devastatingly in the vein of parody. Traditional forms (including syntactical inversion) suddenly became available, not as robust means of expression, but as rich grounds for parody. A destructive though initially exhilarating move; & no doubt necessary.
So how do you get away with using something seriously that has been triumphantly made fun of? The "New Formalism" itself inevitably struggles with this, if not usually very consciously. How do you not sound naive? or, if not naive, exactly, then limited, private, parochial, "special" in the pejorative sense?
Who knows -- but if the answer were obvious, the struggle wouldn't be very interesting.
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