Many of the critics who write on Marlowe feel compelled to pay tribute to the “mighty line,” perhaps even to rhapsodize upon it, and to note the new greatness that Marlowe brings to English blank verse; but mostly they fail to show explicitly Marlowe's achievement as a poet. There are only two essays that contribute materially to our understanding of the unrhymed iambic pentameter that alters into unshakable greatness in the hands of a cobbler's son from Canterbury: these essays were written by T. S. Eliot and C. F. Tucker Brooke. Both date from more than forty years ago, and both leave a great deal still to be said.

Eliot's statement is quite brief, and it abounds in those typical Eliotic pronouncements wherein the writer assumes, so infuriatingly, that the reader knows the exact nature of the unexpressed criteria that lie behind the given statement.