"Whither is fled the visionary gleam?" asked Wordsworth. "Where is it now, the glory and the dream?" These beseeching questions, once forwarded by the poet in the wake of the demise of his childhood sense of belonging, might now rightfully be asked with regard to organicism.¹ What on earth has happened to organicism? What has become of the vitality and importance of this idea? One all too obvious answer might be that, like all the dreams which are mere facile illusions, that of organicism has been decisively banished by the cold, clear light of day. Reverie has yielded to lucidity. Yet what kind of lucidity is it that can do without the haloing light of this "visionary gleam"? Is not, as Poe intimated in the poem "A Dream Within a Dream", all we see or seem directed — or deranged, perhaps — in some form or another, by dreams? And is not all wakefulness harassed, or even tempted, by a return of the obscure, oneiric obsessions of the night?