It's a matter of fluency, isn't it? If you can craft elegant, complex sentences and not sound labored, pretentious or just desperate to meet the requirements of your poem's form, go for it. The problem is when people point to successful uses of inversion to justify their own tortured style.
Inversions in which whole phrases are rearranged seem much less jarring to me than those in which two adjacent words are swapped. For example:
"Upon the brimming water among the stones / are nine and fifty swans"
vs.
"roses red" or "speak you"
I'm not sure exactly what the rules are, but what some critics call inversions don't seem like inversions to me. E.g., putting the adverb before the verb. (The sentence in question was one of mine, and goes: "His impish grin / more eloquently states the case than Yeats.")
Writing in form using "natural-sounding" language is very difficult, and in some cases I suspect the grumbling about it has more to do with that than the grumblers like to admit. I've heard it referred to, sort of disdainfully, as "hiding the form," as if the poet were ashamed to be writing in form. But I think Rhina Espaillat uses pretty natural-sounding language in her formal poems, and she certainly isn't hiding the form out of shame. I think of it more as making it look easy, a time-honored artistic tradition.
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