Deftly orchestrated, rich in archival discoveries, substantial in its preoccupations (philosophical, theological and aesthetic), and argued with agility and nuance, Mark Byron's understanding of a somewhat neglected figure in the Poundian pantheon is powerfully rewarding. The range of learning here is impressive in its understanding of the Carolingian history from which Eriugena emerges as a figure of controversy (a major aspect of Pound's admiration for those who lie outside mainstream culture). While careful to identify the limits of Pound's understanding (particularly in theological matters), it is clear that the source of his admiration is for a largely forgotten thinker in whom he detected the possibilities for a transcendent vision orchestrated by a medieval philosophy of light that marked the continuity of the human in the divine and served as a conjoining of the major strands in Pound's thinking. Byron provides a succinct summary:

Thus Eriugena is seen to function as a literatus, a “deterritorialized agent who cultivates aesthetic activity within a context of political displacement, and who waits out adverse circumstances precipitated by public statement that contravened temporal (ecclesiastical) authority” (242).

What brings this donative array into particular focus is the urge for order (both cosmic and social) in the insistence upon precision and attendant notions of textuality itself. It is here that Byron is most expressive by thinking through the complex practices of Pound's material writerly negotiations where Eriugena is seen to be exemplary. Thematic concerns take on physical and compositional forms here in which shared habits of allusion and citation within the source material create an archive of “textual filiations” (15); that is, a sense not only of the texts themselves, but also of the critical commentaries accompanying them – a weaving together of sources, quotations, traces, etc. Much of early medieval thought, argues Byron, was conducted in commentaries and glosses, rather than in original works, activities germane to Pound himself: “Glossing was a critical activity, by which a glossator might introduce elements of his own argument or seek to augment that of the source text,” and so glossing became an important part of cultural transmission in that “glosses were themselves often transcribed into subsequent copies of a text, as important textual matter in their own right, or as a set of instructional tools to be shared among centres of learning” (63). Such distribution was characteristic of Carolingian thought and provided a practical example for Pound's own material textuality, his habit of “self-reflexive imagination, citation of specific editions and an unusually acute, if eccentric awareness of the interplay of visual and semantic elements in textuality,” an awareness that brings together the familiar conjoining of “words, ideograms, alphabets, rebus images, musical scores, footnotes, prose citations, letters” (242). The “stitched” (100) nature of this procedure permits the alliance of those perpetual strands of the Poundian aesthetic (Confucian and Neoplatonic thought) and acknowledges the means whereby cultural knowledge is transmitted through history.

A crucial foundation here is the advocation of a philosophy of light, given particular focus in the The Pisan Cantos, where its metaphysical certainties offer “a mediation of the inspired word transmitted through (or in spite of) a fragile and threatened text” (217). Light is understood as a principle of intelligence, liberated from the uncertainties of materialism, and is textual “in as far as it cannot project without the basis of clear transmission” (225). This Neoplatonic sensibility shares a space with the visually textual presence of the Chinese ideogram as a “hermeneutic device mediating the abstract (its semantic relation to the text material) and the particular (its striking visibility).” Understood in this way, the ideogram is “an exemplar of difference and discrete object-hood contained within a large framework of metaphysical, linguistic and organic unity” (228).

Not only is what Mark Byron presents, then, a powerful foray into aesthetic and intellectual history, but his focus on Pound's textual materiality (concluding with appendices on an annotated transcription of his reading in Eriugena from Pound's library at Brunnenberg, and on the Italian typescript drafts of Cantos LXXIV–LXXXIV from the Beinecke) also provides one of the best lessons we have for reading the machinations of the poetry.