Jonathan is surely right that no one (no competent speaker of English, anyway) could mistake Paradise Lost for prose or "Return to the City of White Donkeys" for verse,* so just what was Johnson on about, and what did I mean when I said "the fact that Tate's ragged margins are not line breaks makes them, in one important respect, exactly the same as Milton's actual line breaks"?
In neither case should a reader pause, unless some syntactic or grammatical rule requires it, before returning to the left margin of the poem.
That practice would mean disaster for much free verse (more about that another time), but English accentual-syllabic poetry depends on it. Its music and rhythm derive from the interaction between the meter and the cadences of speech, and though each influences the performance and perception of the other, neither must be allowed to distort its partner except in the case of deliberate comic exaggeration. And that is why Johnson says most readers of Paradise Lost are unable to give their listeners a sense of where lines begin and end. The lines are usually regularly iambic — more regular than in Frost — but it's just one iamb after another, with pauses promiscuously scattered medially or terminally or not. If you don't count on your fingers, you're lost.
Obviously, we have no recordings of Milton, nor of most of the great metrical masters. But I'd have to consider long and hard and carefully before saying Johnson just couldn't hear or didn't understand what Milton was about, and, besides, we do have lots of recordings of Robert Frost. I've got the Voice of the Poet CD (there's one for O'Hara, too) with 40 poems. Not once does he pause just because a line is ending. When enjambs, he joins the lines.
Of course, there's enjambment, and then there's enjambment. If our office party doesn't jam me, I'll take that up tomorrow night.
*How it could be mistaken for poetry is something else again, but I'm the guy who said poetry is just "the collection of things which people have been willing to call poems," so I'll live with it. And I like the book, whatever you call the things in it.
9:17:29 PM 
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