I don't think modern syllabics can be compared with failed examples from the birth of English prosody--it is rather an experiment in a kind of metrics (measurement) that will, yes, have different rhythms--maybe more free-versey, if you will. Is there a market for it? If we were worried about market, surely we would be in a different business. A good syllabic poem, though, will not have a problem finding a home!
And what is wrong with line breaks on prepositions? Surely we do that all the time (of/love anyone?). Prepositions are vital.
But rather than resisiting the notion of syllabics--and I realize not everyone will be won over--I wish we could focus a little on looking at successful poems in syllabics and seeing how they work and what is useful. No one is suggesting we abandon traditional metrics, just that this is yet another tool in the toolbox. It is fruitful, and it is fun.
I am leary of arguments regarding what is "natural to the language." Prosody is something that grows, after all, from hybridization, from imports--whether it is Latin adopting the dactyllic hexameter Greek system so that we get Virgil and Lucretius; or English adopting hendecasyllabics from Italian and getting decasyllabics; or rhyme borrowed from Latin drinking songs. We borrowed the sonnet, but it has naturalized nicely, even into an English version. If we were writing what was autocthonous to the language, we would be writing alliterative verse. (And nothing wrong with that, either.)
Here's a beautiful syllabic poem (5/7/5 of haiku stanza) that employs rhyme, punctuating the heterometric effect of different line-lengths and rhythms. The haiku stanza is of course perfect for the subject. notice where lines go into hard monosyllables (fact, fact...) or employ wonderful polysyllabic words (bathysphere).
Thyme flowering among rocks
Richard Wilbur
This, if Japanese,
Would represent grey boulders
Walloped by rough seas
So that, here or there,
The balked water tossed its froth
Straight into the air.
Here, where things are what
They are, it is thyme blooming,
Rocks, and nothing but –
Having, nonetheless,
Many small leaves implicit,
A green countlessness.
Crouching down, peering
Into perplexed recesses,
You find a clearing
Occupied by sun
Where, along prone, rachitic
Branches, one by one,
Pale stems arise, squared
In the manner of Mentha,
The oblong leaves paired.
One branch, in ending,
Lifts a little and begets
A straight-ascending
Spike, whorled with fine blue
Or purple trumpets, banked in
The leaf axils. You
Are lost now in dense
Fact, fact which one might have thought
Hidden from the sense,
Blinking at the detail
Peppery as this fragrance,
Lost to proper scale
As, in the motion
Of striped fins, a bathysphere
Forgets the ocean.
It makes the craned head
Spin. Unfathomed thyme! The world's
A dream, Basho said,
Not because that dream's
A falsehood, but because it's
Truer than it seems.
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