Carol, for my money, the accentual vs. accentual-syllabic distinction does rest on something like a percentage: For me, the question would be whether scanning it in feet tells you anything useful about the poem's rhythm. In the Hardy example Tim posted, about half the feet (if you scan it in feet) are iambic and half not. So "iambic" doesn't seem to be a very accurate overall description of the poem, and might as well be dispensed with. But every line does have a pattern of two strong beats, so calling it "dimeter" does seem accurate. If it's dimeter but it's not iambic, it must be accentual.
But I think you have a point about the line lengths. There are some lines in IP which have spondaic-sounding feet; they might be read as having six stresses (or more, as in Milton's "Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death"), but they're still pentameter lines. But with short lines, the principle of isochrony -- the tendency to hear equal time between beats -- seems to exert a stronger pull. So maybe, with short lines, it's easier to drop or insert extra unstressed syllables -- they don't disrupt the basic pattern we're hearing, which is two (or three or four) equally spaced beats, as in a nursery rhyme:
STAR -- LIGHT -- STAR -- BRIGHT
FIRST -- STAR i SEE toNIGHT
Or a rap song:
i am a NIGHTmare WALKing PSYCHopath TALKing
In a five-beat line (has anyone here tried to write accentual pentameter?) my guess is that it's hard to hear a pattern without a more-or-less regular iambic (or anapestic or dactylic) rhythm to keep things bumping along. Which may be why the Auden example reads like free verse (as it does to me, too).
Perhaps it's that the four-beat line is so fundamental and so persistent in English poetry that we can't perceive a pattern in a line with more than four beats unless there's some extra regularity in the stresses. Or perhaps it's just that a five-beat accentual line is too darn long.
Gloria
[This message has been edited by Gloria Mitchell (edited August 29, 2002).]
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