the caeruleum coelum, the augustum coelum, etc.: “The azure heaven, the majestic heaven, etc.” In glossing the “celestial” or Neoplatonic tradition, Pound borrows the Latin phrase from Ode 6, Book IX (Part II) of Lacharme's Chi-King. Legge translates the excerpted passage as “O distant and azure Heaven!”

“The heaven … place of true knowledge”: Excerpts from the 1871 Oxford edition of Plato's Phaedrus, where he describes “the dwelling of the gods,” a realm of pure forms. The second paragraph in quotation also launches Pound's discussion of Dante's Paradiso in The Spirit of Romance.

It annoys Mr Eliot: At Harvard, Eliot had read Plato in the Greek. In a letter dated January 28, 1915, written from Oxford, where he had begun his doctoral studies on the English idealist philosopher F. H. Bradley (1846–1924), Eliot tells one of his former Harvard professors, J. H. Woods, that he is writing essays on Plato. Eliot reveals, however, that “in general philosophical discussion I did not often really ‘get anywhere’ with him, though this failure was due no doubt as much to my fatal disposition toward scepticism as to his Hegelianism.”

“société anonyme”: Societe Anonyme, Inc., an avant-garde art association founded in 1920 by Katherine S. Dreier, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray as America's first experimental museum of contemporary art.

Iamblichus … tou ton theon pyros: Iamblichus (c.245–325 CE) Neoplatonist philosopher of the Syrian school, author of De Mysteriis (On the Mysteries), where he avers that “the fire of the Gods, indeed, shines forth with an indivisible and ineffable light, and fills all the profundities of the world.” As Liebregts explains, “light is the Neoplatonic single principle from which the plurality of things derive.” Iamblichus's light philosophy comes into view in Canto 5, “Iamblichus’ light, / the souls ascending” (5/17).