It may a vague question, but I haven't found any data on this myself.
I am Russian and I've heard a lot of reading of Russian poetry, since my childhood (poetry reading by heart is a staple assignment in Russian schools when studying literature). And I always felt that poetry has a strong sense of rhythm. I'm not speaking here about free verse, but if a poem has some particular meter, for example, anapaest, the poem will have a strong sense of rhythm when reading.
It's hard to formalize what does "a strong sense of rhythm" mean. I can say that if you can tap along the reading and the tapping will be rhythmical without a poem, it is a strong rhythm. Here are a couple of examples of Russian poetry reading: 1 2 3.
When I discovered English poetry I was surprised that its readings don't have such a strong sense of rhythm. Sometimes they have but more often it seems to me that readers don't care much about the consistent rhythm when reciting. Here's one example - I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth. It has an iambic meter, with 8 syllables in a line. There is a line at the beginning of the second stanza: "Continuous as the stars that shine". In order to keep 8 syllables in a line, it seems logical (at least to me) to read "continuous" with three syllables. But the reader in the video pronounces it with four, breaking the rhythm.
I can give many examples of such irregularities in rhythm, and I have a feeling that English-speaking readers just don't try to keep the strong rhythm and the reading sounds more like free verse (even if the poem itself does have the distinct meter).
Another example is "The Tyger" by William Blake. The poem has a very distinctive rhythm, but the first and last stanzas go like this:
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
The word "symmetry" feels weird here, it fits neither rhythm (last syllable isn't stressed) not rhyme (it doesn't rhyme with "eye"). If I were to read this poem. I would read "symmetry" as "sym-me-trai" (with the stress on the last syllable and sounding like to word "try"). But all the readings I found on Youtube just pronounce symmetry as expected, but break the rhythm.
Am I right, is there a difference between different cultures in the sense of rhythm when reciting poetry? Or is it just me?