Do these inversions work fine? Are these grammatically not wrong? I'm not saying I'm going to use them. I'm just wondering if it's possible or not.

・In front of the door stood he.
・Beautiful is she.

The sentences are perfectly all right in poetic speech. They are not, however, usual speech. Questions about these constructions used to appear on TOEFL tests, but I doubt whether they still do.

In the first sentence, a prepositional phrase comes before an intransitive verb that describes position. "Stand" is one of these verbs. Some others are "sit" and "lie." We can use normal word order, or we can choose the inverted word order to vary the type of sentence and add a certain style.

This kind of sentence, while quite literary, and often poetic, is sometimes used today. A noun, though, not a pronoun, follows the verb. Here are some examples from the New York Times:

"¢ 1900 monument of bronze, marble and granite hails the opening of Amazon ports to ships from throughout the world. In the back stands another 1900 neo-classical structure, the Palace of Justice.

"¢ Filling up post-holiday reports is always a chore and there stood Mr. Imus, backpedaling and apologizing to anyone who would listen.

"¢ ...relationship between the United States and Liberia, which was founded by freed slaves from the United States in 1847. In the front row sat George Weah, the soccer star who lost to Ms. Johnson Sirleaf and initially refused to concede the election, raising...

.patent-leather fez chants a blessing. The worshippers bow, lay their branches down as an offering and file ou Nearby lies a charming lake, surrounded by trees ripening in the autumn warmth and, beyond them, the towers of downtown Tokyo...
_______

"¢ The second sentence, "beautiful is she," is even more poetic. A poem of a beautiful woman might end with "Beautiful is she!" In a sentence like this, a clause beginning with "who" might follow: For example:

"¢ "Beautiful is she who speaks softly and touches delicately."

Rachel

Thanks for the examples.

The reason why I posted the question was that one of the books I have says when the subject is a pronoun, such inversions won't occur, and I didn't know if it was true.