When I was in Graduate School I was fairly obsessed with prosody. I did it as one of my exam fields for my Comparative Literature Ph.D. I even went back and read Saintsbury, which is extraordinarily instructive even in the abridged version. In the 18th century meter was fairly rigid in performance: people actually read poems in strict meter even if they weren't written that way. In other words, if they were reading John Donne out loud, they would put the stress on syllables that weren't really stressed in ordinary speech. We know this because of how they criticized Donne: they complained that he made them stress words unnaturally. (I'm deriving this account from my hazy memory of George Saintsbury monumental history of English idea about metrics.) What this means is that they had pretty much lost the ability to hear Donne's rhythms.

Now the presumption is that if you spend too much time with versification the students will lose interest. It is actually a quite fascinating field, but only for a few of us. I wish I had more of a background in linguistics so that I could really do it seriously.