You know, maybe I should look for recordings of poets reading free verse out loud. (Except that if poets are anything like novelists, many of them will be abysmal at performance, which might do more harm than good when it comes to understanding how this works.) Because this discussion has made me realize that a large chunk of my problem is that when I look at many free verse works, I can't hear a breath pattern that sounds at all effective to me.

Grammatical parallels, those I can spot, and I like them. Thematic parallels, I can sometimes see; sometimes not. Thwarting expections . . . I think I often fail to create any in the first place (or rather, the poem does not create them very effectively for me), so that part often falls down?

Good point about trying early works. I may do that, because yeah, seeing how a thing developed can be very helpful in understanding what its later incarnations are trying to achieve.