Isn't a blank verse paragraph just a chunk of prose bent around corners after every five beats? Try doing that and you'll not only get lines that don't scan, you'll also get, and all too often, the one effect that you definitely don't want: successive lines that rhyme.

That amazing thing doesn’t need my poem, but my poem still needs it, the way every poem still needs all the world.

All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light.

One way or another, all the poets of the thirties and forties reacted to Auden, either by rejecting him or trying to absorb him.